The Good Intentions Paving Company
by Ssergit
Summary: Soulmates are incredibly rare, Hermione reasons. Most werewolves don't ever find their soulmate, so what's the difference between a werewolf without a soulmate who marries and has a kid, and a werewolf who is unaware that he has a soulmate who marries and has a kid? Hermione finds out there's a great deal of difference. Especially when the werewolf's *magic* knows. RL/HG
1. Prologue: What Misery!

For most of his life, Remus Lupin had hated the fact that, somewhere out there, there was a person who was destined to be his soulmate. As a young boy, the feeling was more fear at the _idea_ of a soulmate in the first place; he'd discovered the concept while reading about his lycanthropy and had brought up to his father in innocent curiosity, too young to have known better.

"You'll never find her, if the gods are good," his father had said. "Like as not she'll be normal, not a werewolf, and you'll ruin her life. Most werewolves eat their mates-ripped to shreds, they are. She'll end up hating you before you do it, no doubt."

Remus had been horrified, a feeling that had barely faded two years later when he started at Hogwarts and learned that his father had been wrong on more than one aspect. There were no records of werewolves causing intentional harm to their soulmates, for one thing, and they weren't always of the opposite gender, either. Soulmates did not have to be werewolves themselves, but those that were had an even more intense bond. Not that the bond between a werewolf and human soulmate wasn't intense enough; everything he'd read from Hogwarts' library had told him that the affected humans were happy, almost deliriously so. However, this was what worried Remus the most. He worried that he could somehow ruin a person's life by fancying them a little and causing the soul bond to happen, even though that was said to be impossible.

Remus had reassured himself with the fact that soulmates were also incredibly, impossibly rare.

Years passed at Hogwarts, and Remus's childhood fear eventually faded enough to do some more reading on the subject. The more nuanced material at the Hogwarts library had been lost on him as a First Year. He understood more of the subtlety behind the concept once his voice had changed, his height had started rocketing up, and his shyness had become even more acute in the face of his prettiest classmates. He would never be able to fancy someone and then _will_ them to be his soulmate, which to his fifteen year old self had been both disappointing and a huge relief. He'd know them right away, even if they themselves might not (meaning, unfortunately, that he hadn't met them yet). It took a conversation with his closest friend to really reframe the idea of his soulmate as a physical companion, with all that implied. That particular memory was almost as strong as discovering James, Peter, and Sirius had learned to become Animagi; would that it had replaced the memory of their so-called prank on Snape, but Remus had never had much in the way of luck.

* * *

_Remus and Sirius were lying on their backs near the Quidditch pitch, there to provide support for Gryffindor's Quidditch practice, and Remus had taken advantage of the privacy to confide in his best friend._

_"'S not me, then," Sirius said casually, his tone hovering between rueful and studied indifference. Remus flushed a bit, recognizing his friend's implication in the weight of his words. He let the silence draw out just a bit before nudging Sirius gently with an elbow._

_"Nah, you're my mate, just not my Mate," Remus said, dropping his voice low on the last word. "-and honestly, I don't think our lot could stand any more undying devotion anyway. After you three spent years actually studying to become... well." Remus turned onto his side to look at Sirius, trying to keep his tone light and completely failing. That act of friendship was still very new and very, very humbling. "That's got to mean more than any predestined soul nonsense could, anyway, right?"_

_To Remus's great surprise, Sirius let out a hearty, barking laugh, loud enough that James darted towards them on his broom to see what he was missing._

_"Not trying to shit on your gratitude, Moony," Sirius said just before James got to them, "-but you might want to get back to me about that after you've at least kissed someone once or twice."_

* * *

Nearly five years had passed before Remus truly understood what Sirius meant. Looking back on it now, with the kind of hindsight only twenty years and two wars could bring, he realized that coming of age at a time when suspicion was rampant and death a real possibility had warped him in a very real way. Add the lycanthropy to it and it was a blessing that he'd never come across his soulmate. Sure, that specific catalog of fears he'd sold himself through the years had mostly all been nonsense-the boogeyman equivalent of Slick Silas's Styling Stick versus Sleekeasy's Hair Potion-but the very worst fear was the most persistent. It was also, by the strangest of strange twists of fate, actually true.

_Look at the life you've led,_ the voice of his father would taunt him, fearfully rather than lovingly recreated in Remus's mind. _Can you imagine a witch finding out that she's destined for the rarest of magic only to be shackled to the likes of Remus Lupin! What misery! A smart witch in that position would spend her life writing spells to avoid having to suffer through even a minute of it._


	2. Est 1997

**winter, 1997.**

Hermione hadn't meant to find out about Remus's soulmate. She had needed something to focus on other than Ron's ridiculousness with Lavender, and when Harry told her about Remus spending time spying on the feral werewolves, she became a witch on a mission. It wasn't hard to hide the lycanthropy and magical theory books among her other piles of school books, and to be honest, she was learning more from her own independent studies this year anyway.

Hermione hoped that the Muggle theory of multiple dimensions of time really did exist, because in one of them, she herself was tirelessly devoted to education reform in the Wizarding world, with no Death Eaters or Voldemort to take up her time and energy. This, however, was not that dimension.

At first, Hermione had been irritated by how much the various books focused on the soulmate aspect. It felt like the whole romantic destiny thing had clouded everyone's judgment, even the academics. She spent a frustrated week flipping through every book, using the highlighting charm she'd devised to keep track of the most important passages without actually marking the books permanently. The marks were invisible to most other witches and wizards, and unless she cast the counterspell, her notations would remain in case she needed to refer back to them in future. This came in very handy when, after noting just how miserable Ron was after fighting with Lavender (and how uplifting that felt to watch, from her end), Hermione had a realization about werewolf soulmates.

She had been basing most of her research on the animal aspects of lycanthropy, all but ignoring the threads of humanity woven through the entire condition. Her omission made sense when looked at in context of werewolves like Fenrir Greyback, whose humanity probably lay in tattered shreds at the very back of his subconscious. Remus Lupin was as far from Fenrir as it was possible to be while remaining a werewolf, though. Given that both were formerly human, Hermione realized it was vital to take that into account. If she didn't, she would be treating werewolves the same way as she had treated House Elves-as though each individual was somehow incapable of distinguishing themselves from the group.

In an odd way, everything came back to Remus. In her frustration with Ron, Hermione had a moment of clarity. If she could be out of sorts simply because she had a Not Really a Thing with Ron, what must life be like for werewolves to not find their soulmates? Could wolf mates be something important in their very rarity? Surely Fenrir Greyback didn't have one, or if he did, something terrible must have happened to him or her? Did Remus have a mate, and if so, were they of this time and place?

Humbled, Hermione turned back to the texts she'd dismissed so easily before, reminding herself that for all her prowess in research and investigation, the authors were older and possibly wiser than she was. If so many chapters were taken up by it, werewolf soulmates must be something she should know about, even if it all turned out to be superstition and nonsense. She was surprised to find that, once she'd decided to look at the whole soulmate aspect of werewolves as genuine magical creature lore, a lot of what she had initially disregarded actually made sense.

She set up her lap desk in bed, curtains mostly drawn, surrounded by parchment piles and books. Hermione made notes as she read, grateful that it was Friday evening with nothing to do but attend a Quidditch match (and her studies, but they could wait, and it was just too bad that Harry didn't know what she was doing so he could faint dead away on hearing that sentiment cross her lips).

= The magic of werewolf soulmates is observed to be symbiotic in that it does not only benefit/affect the werewolf, but also their mate

= With very few soulmate pairs thought to exist (believed to be one per quarter century or fewer), the data is severely lacking

= Modern observations and historical accounts over the centuries have noted the following benefits reportedly displayed by werewolf soulmates:

\+ Heightened sense of well-being and security

\+ Accelerated healing abilities for both parties

\+ Stories from historical sources claim possible mild telepathy such as nonverbal warnings of danger

\+ Augmented magical talent in close physical proximity, see Potions Master note below

\+ One quote in an _actual textbook_ said "near perfect sexual compatibility" which is just pure nonsense

= One pair (the werewolf was a devoted diarist) was separated when the human mate died of old age. The female werewolf showed a substantial decrease in strength and magical ability

= An interesting corollary to this was a noted apothecary who rose to gain the title of Potions Master within a year of her discovering her mate and engaging in the werewolf soul bond

= Important: possibility of one or two other well respected experts in magic over the past centuries who managed to hide that they were soul bonded? Important untapped resource?

\+ A werewolf can sense his or her mate via skin to skin touch, even when all other senses have been magically/non-magically muffled

\+ Werewolves possess an extra attunement to the natural scents of sweat and hormones that ordinary humans aren't capable of sensing.

\+ A werewolf's soulmate has a magical quality to them that only the werewolf can recognize via scent and touch

= A dampening effect after the use of the Wolfsbane potion was observed in a few rare cases able to be studied by the author of _Hairy Snout, Human Heart_, Bardalf Amarog, as noted in the twenty year anniversary re-release of the book in 1995

\+ Amarog postulated that the potion alters a werewolf's magical animal attunement that rises in potency around the full moon, essentially 'scrambling' it into useless noise not unlike typical human perception (or lack thereof)

\+ Werewolves suffer from human typical 'scrambling' during the weeks between the full moon cycle

\+ A werewolf's soulmate is the only living being capable of breaking through their insensibility to the world while fully transformed

\+ Prior to the Wolfsbane potion this special ability was essentially the only way other than restraints to control a werewolf on the full moon

\+ A werewolf could be mid-kill and still be drawn inexorably away to follow the call of their soulmate

= Too much to hope that Fenrir has a soulmate? Yes, too much to hope, Hermione

= Some observations by Amarog have suggested that the Wolfsbane potion can dull the effects of the soul bond on the werewolf

\+ This has led to speculation that the theory of soul bonding being directly related to the wolf aspect of the affliction is correct, but further study is required

\+ The fact that no new soul bonded pairs have been reported since the emergence of Wolfsbane (despite advances in magical technology that have improved news sharing) seems to further reinforce this hypothesis

Hermione set down her quill to examine her notes so far. There was nothing about the genesis of the bond itself, which was equal parts frustrating and seemingly typical of the study of magic. "If it works, why question it?" appeared to be the way magical mysteries were treated, to such a ridiculous extent that people like Arthur Weasley were looked on as completely daft simply for wanting to know how everything ticked.

As for soulmates, the concept felt just as muddy as Professor Trelawney's tea leaves were, but certain core characteristics were becoming clear to her. Far from a fanciful romantic conceit, the soul bond thing was well documented and seemed to carry a great, albeit rare, advantage. In practical terms, though, Hermione wasn't sure there was much she could use to help Lupin. She couldn't guess whether or not he'd done his own research-her gut said yes-but Hermione felt she was good at relaying information with a healthy dose of academic distance. She was confident she'd be able to write or speak to Remus about what she'd learned with her research in a way that passed on what was helpful without being awkward.

Hermione reached for her 'Possibly Helpful' list and laid it beside her soulmate information sheet, ready to copy over anything she thought could help Remus. Most of it was obscure stuff that she wasn't entirely sure would be well received ('Folklore states that the reason werewolves keep from the Forbidden Forest and other areas near Hogwarts is due to a certain herb accidentally invented by a former Herbology professor in the 18th century. Wolfswart is said to induce a hay fever-like reaction in werewolves in human form, and was once carried by anxious witches and wizards as a good luck charm to repel them, particularly in that area of Scotland. Beware symptoms of hay fever in that area if trying to keep a low profile, just in case.'), but she wanted to help. She'd always liked Lupin as a professor, and her fleeting crush on him had been a source of embarrassment for her until she'd gotten a chance to see him as a member of the Order. She had decided afterwards that he was the very best sort of person, and Merlin knew she'd felt affection for less worthy professors.

In a way, her self-appointed mission was a sort of atonement for that full moon night in her Third Year. Everything had gone so wrong-Ron's broken leg, attacking Professor Snape, Lupin's transformation. Using the Time Turner had been the cheapest as well as the best way out of that mess, and even then, she'd nearly gotten them all killed not once, but twice, once Remus had transformed.

Hermione pushed down the familiar feeling of regret. She could still see the moment so clearly in her memory, with Remus and Sirius locked together in that half-aggressive embrace as both realized the full moon was rising behind them. Professor Snape standing in front of Hermione and her friends, arms outstretched, terrified until the sound of a distant howl cut through the tension.

Hermione gasped. Hands trembling, she lifted the parchment with her outline about soulmates, her eyes scanning through her notes and comments until they lit on the line she was looking for.

'_A werewolf's soulmate is the only living being capable of breaking through their insensibility to the world while fully transformed'_

She shook her head slowly. That particular moment in time had been a fluke, a call to infuriate the werewolf, to draw him toward different prey. There was no point in ascribing hidden meanings to that chaotic moment in her life. The problem was, Hermione was accustomed to playing devil's advocate in her own head, and this moment was no different. _You always did wonder why that worked,_ she reminded herself. _There was plenty of prey right in front of him, and three of them children! Why run towards the unknown?_

Hermione shut her eyes and turned back to the outline, certain there would be a logical rebuttal written there somewhere. The alternative was completely ludicrous.

'_Some observations by Amarog have suggested that the Wolfsbane potion can dull the effects of the soul bond on the werewolf'_

'_Amarog postulated that the potion alters a werewolf's magical animal attunement that rises in potency around the full moon, essentially 'scrambling' it into useless noise not unlike typical human perception (or lack thereof)'_

"I choose to believe that this interpretation is… deeply flawed," Hermione said aloud, rubbing her forehead, her eyes pinched shut.

"I'm glad we could have this talk," Parvati said, her voice thick and wooly from having been woken by Hermione. "Put out the light and _go to sleep._"

For once, Hermione obeyed her.

8888888888888888888888888888

When Hermione was a little girl, before she'd known magic was real, she and her parents had a family joke about unpleasant chores. Her father used to say that even though ignoring a problem often led to a bigger problem, ignoring it was still easier. He called the phenomenon 'Everyday Creep;' that you could just go through your everyday routine and soon enough the would pass and you forgot that inconvenient problem you were trying to ignore anyway. As a dentist, he'd seen the results of that many times a day, so it was important to him to teach Hermione not to fall victim to the Creep. Every so often, though, she found that exact advice to be the unpleasant chore, and that was how Hermione managed to set aside the troubling suspicions about Remus for more than a month.

First Ron had been poisoned, then they had their Apparition test. Throughout the following weeks, Hermione tried to check in with Harry as often as she felt their friendship could stand. She worried about his extra lessons with the headmaster. He often returned looking exhausted and frightened, which seemed backwards to her, given that he always looked confident and happy when he used his dangerous, notation-laden potion book. She knew it was hard on him when she and Ron were fighting, but that didn't look like it was going to be sorted out any time soon.

It seemed like events were beginning to spiral out of control, both at Hogwarts and the magical world at large. Hermione was struggling to keep up. She had begun to plan for the very worst scenarios she could think of, gathering physical supplies in her bottomless bag along with any information she could think of that might be useful. Every time she compiled a list, though, her thoughts were drawn back to Remus. _Was_ she really doing everything she could if she was ignoring the possibilities brought forth from her werewolf research? She just did not know what to do, and no amount of distraction away from the problem seemed to help, not that focusing on it did much good, either. The best option would probably be to bring up her suspicions to a member of the Order of the Phoenix, but she could not picture herself trying to explain any of it to someone like Mad-Eye Moody or Professor McGonagall.

Instead, she'd taken to walking around the grounds in all weather (the colder the better, in fact) to try to organize her thoughts. She usually took a parchment covered with notes to memorize or a written outline to study, spelled weather-proof, of course. Hermione hadn't realized her routine was beginning to be noticed until she heard a voice behind her on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

"Is that a variation on the _Impervious_ charm?" A female voice asked from behind her. The unexpected shock of being spoken to while out walking the grounds made her drop her parchment. Hermione turned to see an older witch with dull brown hair and a thin smile.

"Oh! Tonks! I didn't see you there," Hermione said. "Yes, I modified it to allow me to write on it with a spelled quill, while still protecting against weather damage."

She'd completely forgotten that aurors were stationed at Hogwarts. Given that the other woman's current hair was far from the bright cheerful pink Hermione knew she favored, she realized she may simply have not recognized Tonks around the castle.

Tonks cast _Accio_ on the fallen page just as Hermione reached down to pick it up, causing her to flush a little. It still seemed wasteful to use magic on something so simple, but she figured it was probably just a matter of upbringing. Hermione flushed deeper as she saw the older witch reading the parchment she'd brought on today's walk. It was the one about werewolf soulmates.

"I thought I might be able to help Professor Lupin, if I researched aspects of werewolf culture," Hermione explained quickly. "This is only one page out of-"

"I'm the last to judge someone for reading up on Remus," Tonks said in an odd tone of voice, as though to reassure Hermione. She seemed to wilt a bit the more she read, however. Hermione felt like she needed to justify herself, as though she were trespassing on someone else's territory.

"He's a good person, and I wanted to help, somehow. Research is pretty much all I can do from here. It might not be much, but I have that page and two others, here." Hermione dug out her DADA textbook from her shoulder bag and retrieved the other two pages of notes. She felt a vindictive sort of satisfaction in keeping them in that book in particular, given who now taught that subject. "The other two are written in suggestion form, that one was me taking notes as I read." Hermione cast the weatherproof charm she'd devised and handed the additional pages to Tonks.

"Think you could teach me that charm? Do me a world of good, that," Tonks asked. After a few more seconds of reading, she added, "These are good, Hermione."

"Thank you!" Hermione smiled. "I actually hadn't thought of how to get them to him, though."

At this, Tonks visibly brightened. "If you'll trust me with them, I'll pass them on. I can't say exactly when, though." She winked, and Hermione nodded in understanding. Even in a protected area like Hogwarts, anyone could be listening. An awkward few seconds passed, during which Hermione's anxiety about the vast difference in tone between her initial outlines and her soulmate notations grew. She had the feeling that Tonks had more than a casual interest in her research, and Hermione felt a compulsion to reassure her.

"I thought that the whole soulmate thing was complete nonsense at first," she confessed, "and I've changed my mind thanks to some of the information I've found-but soulmates themselves are so rare that I'm not sure any of it will matter for the Order."

"Can't imagine Greyback has one," Tonks said, shivering a little.

"If he did, would that mean he could have been meaner than he is now?" Hermione asked."

"Merlin forbid," Tonks said, her eyes turning even more somber. "No soulmate for Remus, then," she added, gesturing to a bullet point on the page. The accompanying smile didn't reach her eyes.

"It seems he'd already know about them, yeah. Remus could have had a soulmate who lived in the third century or something like that, though," Hermione told her. "It looks like every werewolf has one, but most don't happen to live in the same place or time. There's nothing in the research that says a werewolf without a soulmate suffers any ill effects unless they've connected with them and then loses them somehow after that." She couldn't help but notice that Tonks' whole demeanor changed at this. She looked like a weight had just been lifted from her mind. Without thinking, Hermione commented on what she saw as a tacit admission from Tonks.

"I don't mean to presume," she started to say, but the auror waved a hand to stop her, and subsequently dropped one of the pages.

"Just looking at Remus sideways is presuming," Tonks muttered under her breath as she reached down to pick it up. The action, so different from her earlier spellcasting, seemed clearly meant to mask her frustration. Tonks straightened, holding up the completely dry page and smiling. She gave it a little shake to show that the snow it had landed in hadn't clung to it at all. "Quality spellwork!"

Hermione took both the hint and the compliment with grace, and bade her a good evening. As she made her way back to Gryffindor Tower, she thought about Tonks and what she suspected was an attraction to Lupin. Did it matter, really, if Hermione's wild hypothesis about being his soulmate was correct if the result hurt two good people in the process? She personally _liked_ Remus, saw him as an intelligent, good man, but Tonks seemed to be far more attached than she was. Besides, most werewolves never met their soulmates and were never affected by that loss, as far as her research had shown.

She paused at the bottom of the stairs to the girls' dormitory. Would she be able to successfully mask her scent from him? There would be no second chances; if he could sense her, he would _know_. All three books with in-depth soulmate analysis had been crystal clear about one thing: a werewolf who was aware of his or her soulmate needed that person in their life. There was a very popular, fairly bleak folk story about a werewolf kept from his mate-Disney had even made a film about it in the 1980s. Hermione didn't want to cause trouble; she was legally only 17, despite all the extra time she'd added to her life via the time turner, and Remus was probably close to 40. How much chaos and confusion would it cause if, in the course of fighting off the most evil wizard in generations, and while he was foregoing Wolfsbane as a spy against that wizard, his destiny popped up out of nowhere as a school-aged witch!

_No_ she reasoned, _better to devise a simple (or not so simple) masking spell, and keep everything and everyone safe. Besides,_ she reminded herself, _he would have figured it out when you were his student! You're just taking extra precautions, that's all._

Satisfied with the reasonableness of her decision, Hermione started up the stairs to her dormitory, her mind humming with possible avenues to alter her body's chemistry just enough to avoid total pandemonium.


	3. Best Laid Plans

{Chapter notes: The intervening time between this and the last chapter was the end of book 6 and the beginning of book 7. In the week prior to this chapter, Hermione, Ron, and Harry have successfully evaded Death Eaters who attacked during Bill and Fleur's wedding, and at a Muggle coffee shop in London. They've been holed up in #12 Grimmauld Place for the past few days, discovering the truth about R.A.B. and the house elf Kreacher.}

**summer, 1997**

Hermione swore under her breath. She'd done a very thorough job of mucking up her self-appointed task of Maintaining the Status Quo, and she couldn't very well explain what was important about that task to Ron or Harry. She was sure Ron wouldn't even think dropping everything and everyone to be with one's soulmate was even a choice, and as for Harry, well. It was difficult to tell someone whose destiny had been spelled out for him in the form of an actual prophecy that she thought the concept of soulmates was complete and utter fantasy.

"Do as I say, not as I do," Hermione said, crossing her arms and surveying the workbench in front of her. On it were shards of pulverized glass, globs of contaminated potion muck, and, she imagined, a large amount of her own peace of mind. She did _not_ want to deal with this right now.

The problem was with the ingredients of the potion she and Neville had devised at school last term. It had an actual shelf life, a rather spectacular one: left bottled longer than a month, it exploded. Its volatility was at least predictable, but that also made Hermione loathe to meddle with it, in case that meddling destroyed its efficacy. She'd been lucky enough to marshal the help of Firenze the centaur in testing whether anything changed about her once she drank it. Collaborating with Firenze was how she'd learned about a condition called Synesthesia, where a person's senses co-mingle, causing some to perceive musical notes as having specific colors, and others recognizing a scent in certain numbers or letters, among other countless possibilities. It was something even Muggles sometimes got to experience-a sort of genetic remnant of a magical ancestor.

Firenze had Synesthesia, and the way it manifested for him was that every person had an aura of color, and, if they were particularly gifted with magic, a sound as well. He'd told Neville and Hermione that he'd needed to adjust to being around Professor Dumbledore for this reason, because the royal purple/blue of the late headmaster was quite spectacular, as was the deep resonant chord of notes that sounded in the background every time he spoke. Firenze was quite perceptive; he told Neville about his aura without being prompted, which Hermione could tell pleased her friend a great deal. Firenze had told them Neville had an aura of a rich spring green color, accompanied every so often by trills of notes very much like birdsong.

Synesthesia was such an exceptional talent that even Hermione could admit to being jealous.

There had been a few detection spells she had figured out how to use to see if their concoction had worked, but this was the real test-and when she had seen Firenze's expression change a few seconds after she swallowed, she knew she'd succeeded.

"That is… not right," Firenze told her. His expression had been pained. "You wanted to know if I hear music from your magic? I did. I do not hear it now."

"Oh," Hermione had said.

"Before there was the hint of a symphony, but now, chaos. You should not do this thing, child." His eyes were piercing, and for the first time since she'd decided to preemptively hide herself behind a shield of magic, Hermione felt a qualm of regret.

"That means it probably worked, then," she'd said, raising her chin in defiance.

"This potion is like a sun shield," Firenze said, then. "Your aura was golden, your song elegant. Now, it is dull, dim, and dissonant. You cannot bloom where the sun does not shine, Hermione. I can see that you are stubborn, however." His expression had been severe, but his eyes twinkled, not unlike Dumbledore's, just for a moment. "That is the first time I have seen aura in an emotion!"

"Thank you, Professor," Neville had said, and after a stately nod from the centaur in response, they'd headed back to the castle. She and Neville chatted about what they could do to make the potion easier to create, both buoyant from their clear success with the potion. Hermione had also felt ashamed; she respected Firenze, and his reaction had been unequivocal. Despite her decision having been made, she still found herself stung by that regret periodically, even months later.

"Well, I don't have a golden aura right now, that's for certain," Hermione said to the empty basement room around her at #12 Grimmauld Place. She grimly crushed some octopus powder together with flabberghasted leech, pushing back the familiar self-doubt that plagued her whenever she prepared potion ingredients.

Her supply of potion halves had been destroyed during their encounter with Death Eaters in the cafe as she'd desperately ripped items out of her purse in self-defense. Whatever hadn't been used as projectiles had been collateral damage, the remnants of which were now lying in a sad heap at the other end of the workbench. It wasn't the end of the world, of course (Hermione imagined that would come soon enough), but that pile represented a lot of work, not to mention the last of her pre-prepared supply. That wouldn't have been a problem except that she'd used her final two vials during Bill and Fleur's wedding, given that both Tonks and Lupin were in attendance. The newlywed Metamorphmagus and Werewolf both looked so happy that Hermione had taken a second dose of her potion halfway through the evening just in case. She'd planned to spend some hours that night making more, but that was the first night of their flight from danger.

Two hours had passed by the time she'd finished combining everything in exactly the right way. Hermione set her precious five vials up in a line, carefully wound a ribbon around them, and spelled the ribbon to act like set concrete. Just then, Ron called down to her that there was trouble upstairs. Hermione started to tuck her wand away, but changed her mind at the look on Ron's face. She took a deep breath and curled her fingers tightly around her wand instead, and followed him.

"They know the house is here," Harry told her when she walked up behind him. He nodded toward the window. Despite her anxiety, Hermione felt a surge of affection for her friend. He was so good at making his trust of someone obvious; he clearly knew that she could bring herself up to speed, and didn't need him to rehash why they needed to be worried. Worried was definitely the right emotion, too: there were two men snooping around outside. They were clearly wizards in sloppy 'Muggle' clothing that would never fool actual Muggles.

Though she knew in her logical mind that the Fidelius charm kept their current haven safe and invisible, Hermione still felt horribly exposed when she looked out of the window. Nothing but pure, ancient magic stood between Hermione's window and the two furtive looking men outside.

"Those two would belong under 'Death Eater' even in the _Muggle_ encyclopedia," Hermione said. "That's actually… kind of reassuring."

"Reassuring?!" Ron objected loudly.

Hermione couldn't stop from glancing quickly at the men outside and wincing, despite her unshakeable faith in the power of the protective magic. She shook her head disapprovingly at Ron as Harry spoke again.

"Reassuring that they sent those two dunderheads-" Ron let out a suspicious sounding cough/laugh "-to look for us instead of anyone more senior?" Harry finished speaking and stepped closer to Hermione at the window, treading deliberately on Ron's foot in the process. Ron gave up trying to stifle his laughter and giggled at Harry's use of a favorite Snape term.

"Well, there were quite a few hexes waiting for us when we arrived," Hermione said. "I could see some of the more fastidious evil henchmen wanting to miss out being the victim of something Albus Dumbledore left behind."

"Right," Harry nodded. "Well, can you keep an eye on those two? I think Ron and I ought to check the doors again, just to be sure."

"Of course," Hermione said, choosing not to object to Harry's typical 'keep Hermione away from the dirty work' philosophy of division of labor, for once. That decision wasn't lost on Harry, and he gave her a tight smile and a shoulder squeeze as he and Ron left the room. Hermione turned back to focus on the black-clad men puttering about outside, and felt a cold stab of fear as she realized she could now see only one of them.

At the very same moment, she heard a sharp rap against the kitchen door at the back of the house. Hermione started a sequence of deep breaths and chanted to herself, '_That's Ron and Harry's responsibility, focus on your responsibility_' a few times as she scanned the bushes and cars that lined the street outside #12 Grimmauld. Focusing on the syllables of the words as well as their meaning (don't let your friends down, they won't let you down) helped calm her, as always. She was on her third chant, almost back to a normal heartbeat, when she heard Harry shouting something unintelligible. She forced herself to keep her eyes on the Death Eater outside. That turned out to be a good decision, as his companion finally turned up from the other side of a large van. As she watched, the two men conferred with each other for a few seconds and then Apparated away. She knew she was too far away to actually hear the crack as they cast the spell, but she 'heard' it just the same.

Hermione turned and rushed toward the door of the room, her hand aching with how tight she'd been clutching her wand. Right as she reached it, hand on the knob, she heard Ron call out to her.

"False alarm, it's Lupin! His timing is utter shit!"

Hermione snatched her hand away and stared at the door in shock.

It had been days since she'd downed the vials at the wedding. Given how morally grey she still felt her decision had been (and how drastic a change would come about should anyone she confided in choose to share her secret), Hermione hadn't really pushed very hard to test the limits of the concoction. Therefore, she really didn't know how long it lasted, and unluckily, there were no discernible side effects. She seriously doubted it was still in her system.

_If I get out of this situation, I'm adding a long-lasting emetic to that thing, and be grateful for every heave!_

"I've got to finish taking notes about the Death Eaters, be out in ten," she called out to the others. Hermione knew neither Harry nor Ron would ever bother to follow up with her, something she never thought she'd actually be grateful for. Before they came looking for her for any other reason, she cast a localized Muffliato spell around herself and apparated to the basement potion room. Her ribbon stabilized vials were only half of the end product, but as luck would have it, she found a solitary vial of the other half buried in her bottomless bag after five plus minutes of frantic searching. It had escaped the carnage of the cafe by wedging itself inside a half empty bottle of Sleakeasy's Hair Potion, one of the very few things Hermione would not have chosen to use as a weapon.

Too many precious minutes had passed, and Hermione knew that when there were big decisions to be made, Harry and Ron often would discuss something for just about eleven minutes before deciding they needed to find Hermione for her opinion. Adrenaline was still churning through her bloodstream as Hermione released one of the ribbon vials and tapped the powdered contents carefully into the larger flask she'd conjured up. The liquid from her stashed vial was already inside, and she spoke the catalyst spell quietly and tapped with her wand. Opaque brown liquid and sparkling gold powder swirled together until suddenly the concoction became crystal clear and completely transparent. She grabbed it and took just a second to feel the bottom of the flask in case it was too hot before downing the entire thing in one desperate gulp.

Hermione was about to apparate back upstairs when she heard footsteps. She had probably never cast a faster _Evanesco_ spell in her life, but it was effective; when Harry and Remus came into the room seconds later, they found her seated on a chair in the dimly lit corner placing a journal and quill back into her beaded bag.

"It was… here," Remus said, his long strides seeming to falter as soon as he crossed into the center of the room. "I promise you, it was coming from right here, but now it's just… gone. Utterly _gone_." The expression on his face was a peculiar mix of severe disappointment and intense curiosity.

Hermione felt a sick lump of guilt in the pit of her stomach. Her insane, impossible supposition had to be true-there was no question, now. She decided to draw on that guilt in her lie about what she'd been doing.

"I must have gotten caught up in my notes," Hermione said, turning her back to tidy up some nearby potion texts on a bookshelf by the corner chair. "What were you looking for?" The more information she had, the better she could cover for what she knew had to have been related to Remus's senses. Hermione just hoped gathering information didn't involve making eye contact, though. Coming up with plausible excuses was a strength of hers. Lying was decidedly not.

"It was the strangest thing," Remus said, his voice sounding hollow and rough. "There was, well, there was a scent-but Ron and Harry say they didn't smell it, so I'm sure it's to do with werewolf senses."

"Full moon next week?" Harry interrupted. Lupin nodded.

_Stupid, stupid!_ Hermione berated herself.

"A scent?" she prompted.

"Yes, and it was the most delightful-it's almost embarrassing," Remus said, interrupting himself. "I really can't describe it. Imagine something you never knew you always wanted, like your favorite meal mixed with a loved one's well worn sweater up against your cheek." He sounded completely enraptured, and Hermione blushed despite herself. She started chanting in her head. _Remember your responsibility…_

"I can't understand how something that specific is even possible," Remus added. She turned to look at him, allowing her hair's natural sway during the movement to obscure her eyes. The look on his face was intense, and she recognized the expression as belonging to someone who was determined to understand what was going on. Behind Lupin, Harry pulled his wand out and started twisting it between his fingers, a favored 'time to figure this out' posture.

"Could it be another security spell? One that targets an individual?" Hermione threw out as a suggestion. "Drawing the person into the deepest part of the house?" She rubbed her arms, trying to rid herself of the goosebumps which had nothing to do with her pretended theory.

"The three of us _did_ come in through the front," Harry said, scratching his forehead absently. He turned to Lupin. "Did you smell it right as you came in, or before you touched the back door?"

Remus had been wandering through the room, leaning close to bookshelves and other pieces of furniture as though smelling them, coming quite close but never actually sniffing. Hermione mirrored his movements, unwilling to let him get very near her at all. "Not until I opened the door," he answered.

"It stopped the second you entered this room, then?" Hermione said.

"Yes-immediately so, almost as if a switch had been thrown."

"If it was trying to lure an intruder down here, why hasn't anything happened, then?" Harry asked.

"Well, it might know there's one other person in the house to rescue us once something nasty has happened," Hermione suggested; it was a logical conclusion, and she couldn't help getting caught up in the faux mystery despite herself.

"Rescue?" Ron said, his voice gaining in volume as he descended the staircase right outside the door. "What'd I miss?"

All three occupants of the room shouted out for him to hold still, and _not_ to enter the room. As Remus walked over towards a startled Ron to explain as best he could, Harry raised his wand, aimed it vaguely at the center of the room, and said, _Revelio_!

Immediately, the hidden contents of Hermione's beaded, bottomless bag started shooting from the mouth of it. Hermione, who knew the most about what could possibly be inside there, shouted the only sensible response, given the circumstances.

"RUN!"


	4. Total Pandemonium in 5 4 3

When they'd all made it upstairs, the four of them were out of breath, but all smiles. The ridiculousness of the situation had sucked away all traces of concern.

"I cast a stasis spell, so unless you've genuinely got a house full of stuff in there-" Harry said. Ron snorted.

"I haven't," Hermione protested. "Not anymore, anyway. I threw most of it at the Death Eaters in the cafe."

"I'm no longer quite as surprised that we won that," Ron said. "Did I see a tent?"

"The tent makes sense," Harry said. "The Muggle boombox?"

"I will admit to needing to winnow down certain impulsive additions to my bag," Hermione said. "Being able to start from scratch is an unexpected but not wholly unwelcome turn of events."

"Never change, Hermione," Ron said, shaking his head and grinning.

"Woe to anyone who takes you for granted, Hermione," Lupin said with a genuine smile. She couldn't stop herself from smiling back.

"Before I go down and face the music," Hermione said, moving toward the door. "What brings you to our safe house, Professor?" As soon she spoke the words, she could see the drastic effect they had on their recipient. Remus took in a long, ragged breath and scrubbed his large hands over his face.

"First things first," he said, sitting on the edge of a nearby armchair and leaning forward. "Kingsley got everyone out, at the wedding. The Death Eaters have been visiting every household known to be favorable toward Dumbledore, but they've not hurt any people at those places, not yet, at least." This last statement was directed to Ron, who nodded and mouthed a heartfelt 'thank you.' Remus turned to Hermione. "The boys have told me you three were spotted almost immediately once you'd left the wedding," he said. "That's particularly worrisome, considering that they were out here clearly searching for you. That they didn't find you is a clear indication that this location is under _Fidelius_. They're not going to stop searching here."

"Clear to anyone with a brain, you mean," Harry pointed out.

"Well, yes, but underestimating our enemy-"

Hermione couldn't bear the idea of making Lupin go through exactly why such a thing was a bad idea.

"So we take our tents and supplies and go into hiding," Hermione said firmly. "I'd expected that." She turned toward the door with purpose, already thinking about the things to definitely replace in the bag, and scanning her mental catalogue for items she'd not checked off, yet.

"Hermione," Remus said, reaching out to stop her and failing as she walked past.

"You three can catch me up when I'm done," she said, irritated.

"There's more." He was using his 'professor' voice. Hermione could feel the hysteria bubbling to the surface as she turned around and addressed the three of them.

"Our world has gone sideways, everyone we love is in danger, my best friend is the one chosen by magical fate to fix everything, what more could there be for you to-"

"The Daily Prophet today ran an article claiming that Harry is the one responsible for Albus Dumbledore's death."

"It's not enough that they KILLED him, they need to make ME take the blame for it?!" Harry was furious. "You'd think with the Ministry in his pocket the slimy git would be trying to run Dumbledore's name into the ground instead of mine!"

Harry started stomping around gesticulating wildly, and behind him, Ron rushed to grab anything breakable and set it down against the wall, out of sight.

"That's logic, Harry. They're not logical, never have been," Lupin said sadly. "At any rate, the article's not likely to change any minds, but they _are_ likely to spur a reward for your capture."

"I wish we could lace a stockpile of butterbeer with Harry Potter polyjuice potion," Ron said, punching Harry's shoulder lightly in a sort of tough love comfort gesture. "Can you imagine?"

"If only we could have the ridiculous without the evil, or the incompetence without it bleeding across to both sides," Remus said.

"Sorry, mate," Ron said, instantly contrite.

"No," Remus said, standing. "I didn't mean you, Ron. Not any of you. You're the best of a group of truly good people standing against the turned tide. No," he repeated. "I meant _me_." He turned away from the three of them and walked sadly over to the bank of windows.

"Remus?" Hermione said, forgetting the importance of getting out of there in the face of his defeated behavior.

"Come on, Ron, let's start on that room. If They know we're in the area, we need to be ready to clear out on zero notice," Harry said.

Hermione couldn't find it in herself to be angry at Harry's instinct to cut and run. It was obvious to all of them that Hermione was the right person to talk sense to Lupin, even if all of their puzzled looks toward each other made clear that no one had any clue what he could be referring to.

When she shut the door behind Harry and Ron, Hermione turned around, crossed her arms, rested her back against the door, and waited.

"Incompetent?" she prompted, keeping her tone light.

"I could make you a list," Remus said, not looking at her. "But I'm sure you'll object to every entry on it."

"Don't worry, I won't insult your list," Hermione told him. "I'll just insult your ability to self-assess."

"Dora left."

Hermione straightened, her mouth open in shock. "Oh no! Remus, what-"

"I just can't stop worrying," Remus said. He walked back toward the center of the room, scrubbing his hands over his face and then through his hair, leaving it tousled and sticking out in odd angles. "No matter how much she reassured me, how much information from books and articles she showed me-thanks for that, by the way, it was very thoughtful-" Hermione nodded, her hand still covering her mouth in disbelief. "I just never trusted that something about me wouldn't somehow snap and ruin everything. She has so much potential, too much life in her to be tied to me. And now… Merlin, she's-she's pregnant, Hermione."

Hermione sank into a chair by the door. She was completely shocked, and it was clear that Remus still was, as well. She struggled to speak some kind of comforting platitude against the enormous lump in her throat. These two precious, kind, brave people! They deserved every happiness, but now both were suffering.

"She left because of the baby, or…?" she forced herself to ask.

"No, she's happy, says she's happy," he said, taking a few steps toward her and then sort of collapsing in a controlled topple against the wall perpendicular to Hermione's chair. "I drove her away with my fears about the baby. All I could hear was the voice of my father, and all the horrible things he'd told me over the years-that my children would all be werewolves, if I ever found anyone not repulsed by me for long enough to have any. I tried to explain why I was worried, but… She was furious. She told me I wasn't trying hard enough to fight off the bad memories, and she was right! I haven't fought hard enough for Dora, or for the baby," Remus said, gasping for breath against a tide of misery that looked ready to overwhelm him. "I didn't fight hard enough for James, I didn't fight hard enough for Sirius-" All at once, he began to cry, taking in great gulping breaths in between clenched teeth as though he had to struggle not to cry out with the pain of it.

Hermione cast a non-verbal Notice Me Not on herself right away, basically tucking herself into her chair and waiting. She could imagine no one with more dignity than Remus Lupin, and felt oddly lucky that it was she who was able to watch over him in the unhappiness of that moment. Once he seemed to be calming down slightly, she ended her spell and conjured up a thick, soft handkerchief and offered it to him. He took it almost absently and stared at it without moving to use it. After a couple more minutes his breathing evened out, though tears still streamed down his face, some finding their way along his scars. When he spoke again, his voice was a bit more steady, but it was a near thing.

"That's why I'm here," he said. "I've failed as a husband right out of the gate, but I won't fail as a father if I can make a difference in this war."

"You have already made a great deal of difference, Remus, even if none of us ever took the time to tell you," Hermione said, putting as much warmth and gratitude in her voice as she could. "Your classes were the first time most of us had ever found value in Defense Against the Dark Arts as a discipline. You were a constant and loving friend to Harry's parents, and you've been fighting against Death Eaters since before we knew what to call them!"

"That's very kind of you, Hermione," Remus said. His voice sounded distant and overly polite, and Hermione knew instinctively that she wouldn't appreciate or agree with whatever he said next.

She was right.

"I intend for my son or daughter to look back on what I've done the same way that Harry looks back on James and Lily with pride," Remus said. He turned his grief wet face toward the ceiling, closing his eyes tightly as if to evict the last of the tears. "Take me with you, let me do the dangerous things, let my sacrifice help bring victory."

Hermione stared at him in shock, but he refused to look over at her. Instead, he straightened his head, his jaw set stubbornly and his hands pulling into fists.

"With all due respect-" she started to say.

"Ah, the Muggle code for 'you're an idiot,'" Remus said with uncharacteristic cruelty.

"Well, you _are_ being an idiot," Hermione said, standing up and walking across the room to the approximate place he seemed to be staring. She knelt down, putting herself in his exact line of sight and resolutely made eye contact. Hermione raised her eyebrows, daring him to look away from her. "James and Lily Potter became casualties of the war because they were deliberately targeted. NOT because they had an argument with someone who loved them and decided to throw their lives away to make a point! You might even say it was their destiny."

"_With all due respect_, Hermione, you are hardly the person to tell me what is and is not my destiny," Remus said, glaring at her.

The fact that slapping him would prove him wrong made the action incredibly difficult to resist, but she managed to ignore the impulse. Instead, she took a deep breath and modulated her voice back down from infuriated to mildly angry.

"You're defensive. I get it. But if you want to help us, you should help us to _help_ us, not to throw your life away on the off chance people might like you better once you're dead!"

On hearing that, Remus looked away, but it didn't feel like a victory. Hermione stood up and began putting the room back in order. She knew Lupin well enough to guess that he needed some semblance of privacy to back away from the metaphorical precipice he seemed determined to throw himself from.

She'd just finished moving a set of decorative bells (it was strangely comforting to see that Muggles weren't the only ones to collect random useless objects) when she turned around to find him standing silently behind her, very close by. He didn't quite look contrite, but he appeared calmer.

"I want to help. I need to."

"Speaking for myself, seeing you happy would be incredibly helpful," Hermione said. His look of surprise was unexpectedly endearing. "Everything lately has been unrelentingly grim. Knowing people I care about are happy and safe would make it worth it."

"Is there a second option?" Remus said, not without humor.

Hermione set down another knick knack and stepped closer to him, twisting her hands together in front of her to avoid her instinct to reach out. Suddenly, she remembered something from her notes, something that might make a difference to Remus in particular.

"I've done a great deal of research on werewolves," she said. "There is nothing, _nothing_ about it being hereditary. There _are_ werewolf families, Remus, I know you've seen them." He nodded, wincing. "Listen to me, Remus: those children are werewolves, and there's a reason for that, but it's not the reason you think. It's because their parents bite them. They turn their own children into werewolves once the children reach a certain age."

Remus sucked in his breath, eyes wide.

"You would never do that." She said it as a statement, because it simply wasn't a question.

"_Never_," he breathed.

"It's a barbaric tradition, and the fact that you're clearly horrified tells me everything anyone would need to know about what kind of a father you're going to be," Hermione said, trying her hardest to smooth out any rough, angry edges in her voice. That anger was for the werewolves she was speaking about, not the werewolf she was speaking _to_. "Knowing that horrible practice happens is your avenue back to your wife. Tell her you were mistaken. Tell her _why_ you were mistaken. She'll understand."

This was a turning point, and the look of relief on his face was so palpable that she forgot to step away from him, forgot that crucial distance lest one of them accidentally touch the other and give her secret away. She'd clearly lit on exactly the misunderstanding that had caused him the most pain, and its removal had given him a hope that shone brightly on his face. Before she could stop him, he reached out and grasped her hand, words of gratitude spilling from his mouth.

His touch was electric. It was at once warm and welcoming, but also exciting, lighting her up inside in a way she'd never experienced. She felt as though up to this point in her life, her magic had always been on the threshold of something, and she hadn't noticed what had been missing until this exact moment. When Remus touched her, the final barrier to perfection dissolved away. All at once she felt safe, powerful, and cherished.

The two of them stood frozen in place for what felt like a long time, each processing the flood of emotions and sensations, but it was the feeling of being cherished, of being _loved_ that broke the spell for her. That was wrong-that was a manufactured emotion, and it was completely misplaced as far as Hermione was concerned. The bowled-over feeling she'd felt faded just as quickly as a burst balloon that had gone spinning in circles away and out of sight.

_Now what do I do?!_

"Hermione?" Remus's eyes were closed. If she played her reaction perfectly, the explanation she'd thought up just now might work.

"Remus, you're scaring me a little," she said, trying to eradicate any breathlessness from her tone of voice. His touch still affected her like a drug, and it was hard to concentrate, but when she tried to pull away, his grip tightened, and he opened his eyes to stare at her. He looked, in a word, wrecked. Her entire plan hinged on the feeling not seeming to be mutual.

"Did you get hit by some sort of seizure spell?" Hermione asked, avoiding looking at him and instead focusing on trying to get him to let go of her hand.

"_Hermione_," he repeated. "You didn't feel that?!"

"Well, I'm losing the feeling in my hand, so _that_ part, I feel," she said. Lying to him felt like she was slowly filling herself with bile from her toes on up. It was horrible. "Are you able to let go, or should I try to cast something?"

"Hermione!" Remus said, exasperation and wonder warring in his voice. He was clearly trying to get her to look at him, and in so doing, grabbed Hermione's other hand. It took every single ounce of her concentration and power to school her face into one of frustrated confusion. Remus Lupin belonged with Nymphadora Tonks and their baby. '_This is your responsibility, remember your responsibility.'_

"Don't worry, Remus, we'll sort this out," she said, the wooden tone of her voice reminding her of the very big lie she was trying to sell to the person who was now unquestionably her soulmate.

"You genuinely didn't feel that?" Remus said in clear disbelief. He dropped one of her hands, but seemed loathe to release the other.

"Can I throw out a guess?" Hermione asked, still studiously avoiding looking him in the face.

"Please?" he answered. His voice sounded incredibly lost.

"Does this feel anything like the scent you were chasing when you first got here?"

"Actually, yes," he said, suddenly dropping her hand like it was covered in poison. The resulting loss of euphoria sent her mind reeling-it hurt far worse than she'd anticipated. She reminded herself that Remus would be feeling the same way, and that she should keep that in mind when assessing his mood and reactions.

"What… if you don't mind me asking, what did it feel like?"

"Like you're my soulmate, Hermione," Remus said, simply.

She drew on every bit of her skepticism since first suspecting that very possibility, but couched it in a manner that implied they were both in on a very great joke. "Well, that's a load of nonsense, right? So what could it really have been?"

Remus looked almost offended. Almost being the key word, there. The seed of doubt had been sown, and Hermione's job was to make it grow.

88888888888888888888888

Hermione couldn't sleep.

It had taken a little over ten minutes to convince Remus to believe in her 'theory' of a spell designed specifically for him by Severus Snape. She suggested the spell had successfully latched onto him as soon as he'd entered #12 Grimmauld Place. It was actually one of the best plans she'd ever come up with, ironically. The idea that Snape would devise a spell to confuse and distract two of the most trusted members of the Order of the Phoenix without outright attacking either of them was characteristic of the man. Both she and Lupin were among the Potion Master's least favorite people, and the confusion and disorder the discovery could have sown would probably have fostered resentment and misery in more than just the two most affected parties.

Once the situation had been explained to Harry and Ron, Remus was persuaded to head towards home and concoct the best plan of action to regain the affection and trust of his wife. Hermione fervently hoped that the shock and intensity 'Snape's curse' wouldn't damage the relationship further. After all, she had never intended for the bond to be discovered in the first place, much less during a low period in Remus and Tonks' relationship.

_Here's hoping being loved and loving that person in return will help erase the memory of that moment,_ Hermione thought to herself. Personally, the touch and its aftermath was pretty much all she could think about, to the point where she wished there was a safe and easy way to _Obliviate_ herself. Even then, though, it would probably be suspicious for her cover story if she managed to forget such a blatant 'attack' on herself and Remus.

It felt like her magic _ached_. That perfect harmony she'd experienced had given her a glimpse of the highest state of magical being, with two people in complete attunement with each other in body, mind, and magic. Except it was a shameful lie! Neither Remus nor Hermione had any shred of romantic attachment for each other, and the entire feeling was magically projected onto them as though they were completely blank slates with no free will of their own! _Surely_ the truth of werewolf soulmates was that the potential for that sort of hypnotic bliss was greatest for those particular people, not that somehow the magic would force it into being.

Surely?

Another of her father's favorite pastimes was playing Devil's Advocate. He'd been firm in his conviction that no opinion was solid unless the person holding that opinion was at least willing to entertain the possibility that they were on the 'wrong' side, or that there was something that could change their mind. At 9:30 PM, Hermione had shut the mental door to Devil's Advocate. Now, at 1:43 AM, she unlocked the door and allowed her mental gravity to pull it open a crack.

Maybe soulmates were so rare that any pair of people who discovered they were bonded simply threw their hands up and accepted fate, no matter what their circumstances had been like beforehand.

Maybe soulmate magic reached out through the cosmos and designated which souls were destined to remain separated by time and space, and which souls were destined for the harmony and bliss she'd glimpsed when Remus had touched her. Maybe that magic was wiser than they were?

Maybe magic didn't have a rhyme or reason when it came to soulmates, and the reward for having your life turned upside down was the intense power, security, and compatibility that happened if you were lucky enough to find each other?

Maybe it was all three.


	5. Regret

Despite their worries about Death Eaters camping outside their safe house and waiting for one of them to make a mistake, Harry, Ron, and Hermione remained at #12 Grimmauld Place for the whole month of August. Unfortunately, the Death Eater spies also remained, and they had come to joke about their presence rather than draw wands at the very sight of them. Not that Hermione felt she had a lot to joke about, really.

The revolving revelations of where Regulus Black's locket was (Kreacher has it! No, Fletcher does! Wait, _Umbridge?!)_ served to help distract her from her own woes, as she had come down with a nasty cold that was slowly sapping her strength, both physical and magical. It had started about a week after Remus had touched her. She absolutely refused to call him 'soulmate' instead of 'Remus,' and not just because her companions would have ferreted the truth out of her if she had slipped and spoken that word out loud. No, nothing had changed, as far as Hermione was concerned, and nothing would change. What had happened was a fluke of magical flotsam that she intended to disregard until the end of time, whether that lay at the completion of their task against Voldemort or beyond.

Hermione wasn't sure which she'd hated more, the technicolor dreams she'd been having about that moment of first contact, or this debilitating misery of a persistent cold she'd had almost ever since. She hadn't realized just how sick she was until Ron brought her lunch in the library she'd made her de facto home during the day. She'd lifted her wand and cast a spell to open the curtains further, to afford more sunlight into the room. That action brought Ron's attention to the spell she'd been using before he'd entered.

"Hermione, would you cast _Lumos_ again?"

"Of course," Hermione said, casting it and holding her wand up. Ron didn't say anything, but when he cast the same spell and held his wand beside hers, Hermione gasped. His wand's light was easily twice as bright as hers. Ron was no slouch, but there was usually a crispness and efficiency to Hermione's spells. This was a worrisome anomaly.

"That's just not right," Harry said, entering with a cup of tea for Hermione. "No offense, Ron."

"None taken," Ron said, swishing and flicking the curtains open wide. "Something's clearly wrong."

"I'm just sick, that's all," Hermione sniffed, wiping away snot against the sore part of her nose again, and wincing.

"Had you two been sick much, since starting at Hogwarts?" Ron asked. He walked over to a stiff looking fancy highback chair that everyone in the Order called the 'Walburgabacked' chair. Instead of sitting on the chair itself, he sat on its prim footrest, swiveling around to rest his feet, shoes and all, in the seat's cushion. Ron then leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head as though living in luxury.

"No, actually. I was sick way more often with the Dursleys," Harry said, looking thoughtful. "Didn't really notice it before, but yeah, I'm never sick as a wizard."

"That might be hygiene related, you know," Hermione pointed out. "But yes, even with my germ phobic parents, I got sick more often as a kid than I do now."

"Sick's pretty rare, but it happens. Sick with weak magic? That's something else. You need to be looked at," Ron told her.

Harry nodded decisively, and cast his Patronus. "Our library needs a librarian, the books are losing magic!" he said to it. The stag nodded to him gravely and leaped into the wall nearest to Harry, disappearing through it in a flash of bluish light.

"I'm definitely sick," Hermione said, resting her hand over her face as she lay back in her couch. "I don't have the energy to object to being called a library."

An hour later, they all heard the sound of a chiming bell at the back of the house where Lupin had entered a month prior.

"I'll get it," Harry said.

"I didn't know there was a back doorbell," Hermione said to Ron. The sound of Ron's soft snoring was the only response.

A moment later, Minerva McGonagall swept in. Before Hermione really knew what was happening, her former Professor was seated beside her, one cool, dry hand against Hermione's forehead, the other holding a wand gently to Hermione's chest.

"Well?" Harry said anxiously.

"Your concern is a credit to you, Harry," McGonagall said. "There is definitely something unusually wrong."

She looked very concerned, and Hermione felt a stab of guilt, as though she'd stolen something from Snape's potion stores or snuck into somewhere she shouldn't. Her demeanor never wavering, McGonagall turned to Harry and, with a tight smile, she spoke again, more loudly than was necessary.

"I brought Sunday's _Daily Prophet_ with me-there's an article on a new Bludger material I thought you and Weasley would appreciate."

Ron snorted awake, falling sideways off of his footrest and rolling to his feet as if by design. He and Harry left the room with a nod from each to Hermione.

"Now that that's settled," McGonagall said, "Tell me what you've done to put your magic so out of alignment!"

"Me?" Hermione said weakly. She wasn't equal to the patience of her Head of House, however. "I didn't- Well, there was a… It can't be related!" she protested, sitting up a bit.

"How long have you been sick, dear?"

"Professor-"

"I've always prided myself on my ability to transition from educator to mentor, mentor to friend, Hermione," McGonagall said. "I would be pleased if you called me Minerva."

"Use your first name? I feel like you've just caught whatever I have," Hermione joked. To her surprise, McGonagall-_Minerva?_ laughed.

"I'm quite certain that would be impossible," she said. "There is a definite pull in your magic. Something is drawing it away, but strangely, there's no anger or malicious intent that I can sense. That is most unusual."

"That-" Hermione had been ready to call up some sort of excuse, for her brain to supply her with a ready explanation on demand, as always. The only thing she felt, though, was exhaustion. Her tone had been forced and cheerful, but now, she was just grateful she had reason enough to tell someone what she'd had to hold back from her very best friends. "That sounds about right."

888888888888888888888888

Hermione told her everything. To her credit, Minerva understood Hermione's reticence and did not immediately demand that she descend on Remus and Tonks' new home and claim ownership of her former professor. She did tell Hermione that the fact that they'd touched each other and both clearly felt the emotional and physical effects of that meant that ignoring it forever would not be possible. That touch was somewhat of a magical time bomb, and she felt that Hermione's sickness was living proof of that. She had agreed that it was a terrible time to upset the balance of the Order of the Phoenix, however, and to that end, gave Hermione advice, some instructions, and a potion.

"You need to prepare yourself, my dear. This will eventually have to come to light, and when it does, not everyone will be able to make peace with it right away."

Minerva's tone had been kind, but there was a thread of regret in her voice that Hermione couldn't help but worry about the more she thought about their conversation. She'd always appreciated their former head of house's ability to, as she'd told Harry once, 'stand beside us for the hard truths.' Part of what Minerva had left her with was a plan of action to help stand against those hard truths, but deep down, Hermione knew that she was going to have to stand essentially alone. Purebloods would understand the bond, but be mystified at her reaction. Hermione felt she could safely say that at least some Muggle-borns would understand her choice to hide from it. Half-bloods could be like McGonagall, herself a half-blood, and be sympathetic but pragmatic. Or, they might be neither. Hermione imagined that one half-blood in particular would prove to be neither. Part of Minerva's instructions was to write that person a letter.

Hermione waited until Ron and Harry were both out surveilling the Ministry. She first wrote an outline of what she wanted to say, then she cast a spell on her outline to scramble it, the goal being to suss out any problems with her phrasing that would make things worse should the letter's recipient skip around rather than reading it straight from beginning to end. By the time she wrote the actual letter itself, it was very late at night, and her emotions were high. Hermione instinctively cast her weatherproof spell to keep any stray tears from marking the parchment, but the memory of speaking about that very spell to that very witch caused her to stop, bury her head in her hands, and sob.

After a few minutes Hermione got up, made herself a cup of tea, poured a small dose of Calming Draught into it, and made herself finish her task. When she was done, she made two copies of it. One would go directly to Minerva McGonagall with instructions that it be kept for what was essentially evidentiary reasons. '_This_ sender clearly had _these_ emotions and explanations at _this_ particular point in time.' The second copy was transfigured into a hideous hair clip with strands of Hermione's hair added to it as though she'd ripped it from her own head in disgust. She tucked it into her beaded bag, certain that no one who found it would do anything other than huck it back into her bag and forget about it completely. The original was to be placed in a special location with instructions for Harry to retrieve it and present it to the recipient if a certain sequence of events were to occur (these were also relayed to McGonagall).

As Hermione carried the letter over to the book she'd chosen to hide it in, she looked it over one last time. It felt strange to see such private truths written in her neat script, especially since knowing a thing is true and admitting to knowing it's true were such very different things. Hermione wondered whether the very first line of the letter would one day become an uncomfortable truth all on its own, once everything she knew and had written about inside that letter became more well known.

_To Mrs. Nymphadora Tonks Lupin,_

Hermione suppressed a shiver and placed the letter on the second page of the book she'd chosen. She hoped Harry would appreciate the humor in her choice as she reached up on her tiptoes and placed _Powers You Never Knew You Had and What To Do With Them Now You've Wised Up_ back on the shelf.

It was time for the potion.

When McGonagall had told her about it, the older witch had actually clapped her hands once in excitement. Their world, with all its magical maladies and horrific hexes hadn't completely escaped the kind of misery that sometimes befell Muggle pensioners, unfortunately. There was a sort of magical Alzheimers that afflicted mostly members of long-established pureblood families. It was called the Doddering Curse, but it wasn't actually a curse, it was basically a degenerative disease. It was an uncurable condition where sufferers were slowly sapped of their magical energy and physical strength. The only treatment was to take a potion that basically acted as a magical force field in the brain. Hermione had likened it to the blood-brain barrier, an organic filter of sorts, and Minerva had nodded in approval of the comparison. Shortly after their conversation, the older witch had gone to an apothecary and obtained a supply of potion, promising to come back later that same day.

"Here it is, and you can be my witness if that failed student of mine chooses to speak to the _Prophet_ about having seen me purchasing it," Minerva had huffed indignantly to Hermione once she'd returned. "He thought it was for _me."_

The potion was in a small bulbous bottle, and it was a rather beautiful shade of blue. There was a parchment scroll wound tightly against the stopper, no doubt designed to force the user to unwind it and read before imbibing. Hermione did just that, and started to read the label aloud, as she was alone. Harry had told her tonight was the last night for information gathering-tomorrow or the next day, they'd put their plan in action. The cauldrons of polyjuice were nearly finished, waiting to be bottled and taken to the Ministry to put their plan in motion. Hermione hoped that the blue potion in her hand would work well in conjunction with polyjuice. Her research earlier that day hadn't indicated any side effects, but she supposed it wouldn't matter anyway. It wasn't like they had many other options.

_Brain Bond Anti-Aging Sorcery Shield and Curse Cleanser! BBAASSCC in the comfort of pure protection!_

Hermione suppressed a giggle. Minerva had told her the potion was being newly advertised as being useful in protecting against hexes and curses (possibly even the Unforgivables), thanks to some recent research showing positive results on that score. Oddly, this had served to persuade Hermione that using the potion was a good idea. Even if it didn't help with the soul bond calling out to Hermione's magic, as they both assumed, perhaps she might be more resistant to the worst kind of spells that the Death Eaters liked to throw at them.

Hermione felt uneasy about circumventing the pull of her magic, but it was leaning in a way she simply could not in good conscience allow it to go. The diagnostic spells McGonagall had performed on her had indicated an outward straining, as though she had been tied magically to something or someone (and she _had_, whether she'd wanted to be or not), and that the distance between the two of them was causing that connection distress. The Doddering Curse was similar in that sufferers' magic seemed to also lean away from them, pulled away by an unknown force that no one yet had been able to discover. The only thing that worked to slow the effects was the BBAASSCC potion, because it formed an impenetrable barrier around the user's brain, preventing any 'magical tilt,' as the research called it.

"Here goes," Hermione said, removing the stopper and taking a deep, calming breath. Then, she swallowed the potion in a single gulp, as the instructions recommended.

88888888888888888888888

They infiltrated the Ministry the next day.

Mafalda Hopkirk was close enough to Hermione's stature that Hermione wasn't struggling to adapt to her new body (she _was_ struggling with having actually abducted the woman, but there wasn't much of an alternative, and this _was_ war), but Harry's choice of Albert Runcorn had left him a bit off kilter. Ron looked like he fit in well (she wondered if that had to do with choosing a ginger), and initially, Hermione had felt like they might just pull their insane plan off, despite her misgivings. Then, Dolores Umbridge had appeared and set Hermione up right in the middle of her web-like courtroom, forcing her to record things that would have set even Argus Filch's teeth on edge, and that was saying something.

Then, Hermione's cold symptoms recurred, and initially, she simply felt grateful. The cold, unfair attitude Umbridge displayed was impossible not to react to, and it wouldn't do for Hermione's Mafalda to appear distressed. Sick, yes. Objecting to the proceedings, _heavens, no_. She'd been on the verge of spelling a handkerchief to unobtrusively wipe her nose and eyes periodically when she spied the locket they'd been hoping she had kept locked away in her office. _It was right there, on her neck!_

She wasn't surprised when the evil toad lied about where it came from. What _was_ surprising (and shouldn't have been in retrospect, because _really_, what were they thinking involving Harry Potter of all righteously indignant people in a situation where he had to keep quiet about monstrous injustice?!) was when Harry cast two stunners from under his Invisibility Cloak and all hell broke loose in the courtroom.

Hermione had felt strong that day. She'd felt healthier and more focused after taking the potion the night before. Therein lay the problem of lying by omission, though. Being deceitful had felt like its own punishment, but the real punishment was far, far worse. She could feel the weakness hit her like she'd been the target of a far-flung ballista, and it struck at the worst possible moment: right as she and Ron and Harry Apparated out of the Ministry.

She was distracted.

She wasn't herself.

She hadn't expected to need to Apparate _four_ people.

The excuses could flow like rain, but the fact was that Yaxley had seen them, and while they'd managed to shake him off, he had seen where they were going. There was no returning to #12 Grimmauld Place.

That wasn't the worst of it, though.

The consequences of lying to her dearest, most trusted friends became clear when she'd Apparated the three of them away from #12 and into the woods, far away from anyone and anything. They became clear with Ron's cry of pained anguish.

She'd splinched him.


	6. A Beautiful and Terrible Thing

**Notes: **"The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." Please be reassured, Tonks lovers-there is no bashing here.

Remus was asleep. He could tell, because he was having the Dream again-the one where he touched Hermione's hand and she really _was_ his soulmate. The Dream was different every time. Some were nightmares; Remus and Hermione were ostracised by their friends and family, Dora and his unborn child among them. Others were visions of happiness, with each obstacle overcome miraculously and all their loved ones coming to a perfect understanding. He wondered which this one would prove to be, as he had just now taken Hermione's hand.

* * *

The sensation of _rightness_ was so overwhelming that Remus couldn't do anything but close his eyes and hold on. He'd read a book once about imaginary magic in a medieval setting, where a child was the Chosen Protagonist and had gotten kidnapped by an evil queen. She had poisoned his blood to make him her thrall. The latent magic within the child as well as the magic of the universe itself had intervened, teaching the young wizard how to cure himself. "_Think about your blood. Now, imagine that your blood has turned green-it will hurt, but this will burn away the poison. Hold it there, hold it, now! Perfect, now change it back!"_ In the story, the young boy had felt as though his blood was on fire, touching each part of his body, from his head to his toes. Every single part of Remus's own body felt just like he imagined the character had felt in the story, except instead of blood full of poison, he felt as though his was filled with pure, unadulterated _joy_. This was right. This was his soulmate!

"Remus?!" Hermione said in a quiet, stunned tone.

"I'm here," he assured her.

"Is this a trick? I feel-" she paused, and Remus felt a thrill along his spine as he felt her step closer and place a small, gentle hand on his chest. "The magic required to generate this kind of intensity would be just… impossible to manage, in a spell!" She had turned to one of her signature defenses, and was clearly trying to reason her way out of the confusing situation.

He felt the emotional intensity increase as he looked down at her, her familiar unruly hair tucked precariously into a knot that looked as ready to burst apart as his chest did.

"Feels real enough to me," he said, quelling the instinct to gather her into his arms when she looked up at him and smiled shyly.

"But how -?"

"Well! I've somehow managed two impossible things in a matter of minutes," Remus said, grinning. "I've gone and discovered my soulmate is someone I already knew, _and_ I've stumped Hermione Granger."

He told himself her immediate blush at his words would have been endearing even if she hadn't been destined to be his from the beginning of time.

"Well, it _is_ difficult to think, you know," Hermione told him, her lips twitching in a way that he just knew meant she was valiantly suppressing a big smile.

"Very," he agreed. "Maybe this will help?"

Remus pulled the hand he'd been holding for so long up beside her other one and then pulled her close, giving himself permission to breathe in the clean, slightly spicy smell of her. The ferocity of sensation from the bond had lessened into an easy familiarity now that it was clear they were both at least comfortable with the concept. Her hands crept around from against his chest to his back, and they just stood there for a long while, drinking each other in.

"Uhhhh, guys?" Harry's voice broke through the haze of happiness. Remus suddenly realized that he knew, absolutely _knew_ Hermione was his soulmate and that everything would work out. He could tell from his reaction, just now: he hadn't jumped in embarrassment. He didn't feel it necessary to pull away and try to explain himself, either-and neither, it appeared, did she.

"Oh," Hermione said, her voice muffled against his chest. "I'm sure this is confusing."

"A bit. Let me go give Ron something to do, I think he would… Let me go find him something to do," Harry repeated, then retreated.

"Hmm, Ron," Hermione said, rubbing his back gently then pulling away, but staying nearby. "I do hope he won't be too upset. He's likely to be slightly disappointed, unless I've read him wrong. At least he's-OH!"

Hermione went from seeming as though she wanted to move closer to him and looking regretful about Ron to looking horrified and moving to the farthest corner of the room.

"Hermione, what -?" He wanted to make it better. He _needed_ to make it better, whatever it was, whatever it took. To his very great dismay, she looked at him and burst into tears.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Remus-if I had known…"

"Whatever is wrong, we can solve it, all right? Please, you must calm down," Remus said, starting toward her only to be shocked by the way she held her hands up to ward him off.

"Your wife, Rem- I mean, Professor!" Hermione said, looking miserable.

Remus felt a sharp pang as he realized he hadn't considered Dora at all.

It wasn't that he didn't care for her, it wasn't that he hadn't loved her, or that he hadn't been happy to marry her. It was just that those facts paled in comparison to the strength of Destiny. He'd done his research, and soulmates just weren't comparable to any other relationship. Nymphadora Tonks was a half blood, and her family on the magical side was one of the oldest and most regal. She'd hate it, she'd rail against it, she'd be _so_ very angry, but she'd understand. Hermione, as a Muggle-born witch, though... She clearly did not grow up with an understanding of the rarity and complete inevitability of certain kinds of ancient magic, that was certain. This was going to be tricky, as Sirius would say.

"You're deciding how to 'handle' me," Hermione said angrily.

"Even an enemy would know better than to turn their back on an angry and distraught Hermione Granger," Remus said, forcing himself to lean casually against the wall facing her. He put his balled up hands into his trouser pockets to hide them, knowing Hermione would recognize the tension he was under from the obvious body language.

"Well?" she said, crossing her arms and glaring at him.

"That's a very good way to get someone to feel obligated to tell you something, Hermione," Remus said calmly. "What would you like me to tell you?" He'd expected her to be on the attack, to throw more fire and fury at him, but instead, her anger seemed to dissipate in the face of his mild, bland question.

"What are we going to do?" she whispered, rubbing her hands over her arms and shivering.

"It's a very ancient, literally legendary magic, Hermione. Giving way to it-basically acquiescing to its power-is almost genetically wired, for most of us."

"Are you saying that, with no prior... relationship-" at this, Hermione blushed crimson, tipping her head back and rolling her eyes as though completely disgusted by her own reaction "-you're saying we go hand in hand back to your _wife_ and just tell her she's been replaced?"

"I imagine we'd be far more tactful-"

She didn't let him finish. "Everyone will be completely fine with this, and won't be suspicious that somehow there was something else going on, even though this is a bolt from the blue-" her voice dripped with sarcasm and heartbreak.

"I've never even heard of a couple who discovered their Bond after having known each other for any length of time, Hermione," Remus interrupted. "Usually, it's accepted because there wouldn't be any possible reason for two strangers to meet and agree to lie about it from the very first. There are spells to verify the soul bond, you know."

"No thank you, on the spells," Hermione said, walking toward him. "I think I know just what to do. I'm sorry, Remus," she said.

He was confused right up until he saw her raise her wand. He was so surprised that she'd actually attack him that he didn't even try to cast anything defensive. Hermione looked like an avenging angel, determination and sorrow and righteous indignation all but glowing in her eyes.

"_Obliviate!_"

* * *

Remus shuddered awake, the flash of bright light from Dream Hermione's spell seeming so real that he felt blinded even as he lay in his own bed at home.

"The Dream again?" Dora asked. He felt her hand brush his arm as if to comfort him, but it was gone almost as soon as it began.

"I'm sorry, my dearest," Remus said, opening his eyes and blinking against the weight of how realistic the Dream had been yet again. He rolled over to find Dora curled up against his pillow. He reached out for her.

"Tell me?" she asked him, allowing him to pull her close against his chest. He was grateful and moved by her generosity. He knew the dreams hurt her, and she knew he knew they did, but she still gave him the chance to hurt her in that way every night she slept beside him. It was courage and loyalty and stubbornness and pure, beautiful Dora.

He didn't ask if she was sure, as they'd been through that particular discussion enough times for him to know better. At least this time the Dream had ended rather unusually.

"This one was new: she _Obliviated_ me," he said, chuckling slightly.

"She what?" Dora lifted her head up, plonked her elbow down close enough to his shoulder to hurt a bit, and then dropped her head onto her waiting hand.

"It was actually-she was really upset, you see, because if she was my soul mate, then what would happen to you?"

"Maybe fifteen Dreams ago I'd have thought that was a really sweet gesture of Dream-Mate Hermione, but I'm sorry, I'm a bit past 'over it,' now," Dora confessed. "To _Obliviate_, though. That's new. That's-"

"I was so shocked that I didn't even cast _Protego_," Remus confessed. Dora, however, was looking thoughtful.

"Realistic," she finally said, finishing a sentence Remus had forgotten she'd even started.

"How do you figure?" he asked.

"I don't know her all that well," Dora said, sitting up and crossing her legs underneath her, losing his pillow to the floor in the process, somehow. "But most of the scenarios you've told me from the Dream so far, they've just felt… not quite right."

"The whole thing is not quite right, and I really wish they'd fuck right off, these Dreams," Remus said in a low growl.

"I appreciate that, but they haven't for almost a month, so we should stop just lying back and thinking of England," she said. Given that he knew that Dora had probably learned that particular Muggle phrase from her Muggle father, Remus decided to pretend he hadn't heard that part. In his musings, though, he'd missed the rest of her comment.

"Remus?" She looked uncertain and unhappy. He felt like a complete and utter prat. No matter how often he'd told her he didn't get lost in the memories of the Dreams, she always worried. He'd just gone and given her another reason to think he'd done just that.

"I'm sorry," he said, choosing to go with the less insulting truth and hoping she would believe it, instead of assuming he'd been daydreaming about Hermione. "It's just that my brain checked out when I realized your father might have taught you that particular phrase. Forgive me?"

"Oh dear," Dora said. Her face and her hair flushed bright crimson. "You're right, of course. Let's… just focus on anything but my Dad, right now, all right?"

"Yes, let's."

"So, tell me what happened in tonight's Dream?" Dora bit her lip, and he resisted the impulse to kiss her. She was clearly determined, and he had to balance the good instinct of 'she would feel loved' with the knowledge of 'she'll think I'm trying to distract her' when deciding what to do. He decided to pull himself up against the headboard to answer her, hoping that would show her how attentive he was to her questions.

"Typical start, like always," he said, unwilling to hash that part out in detail. "Harry came in and saw us hugging."

"Hmm," Dora said, ominously.

"He said something about Ron, and I think the implication there was that Ron has a thing for Hermione. She said she wasn't sure how she'd deal with his disappointment, and then she ran to the other side of the room and started to cry. She said she wasn't going to come between you and I, and then she cast the spell on me."

"There was nothing else said, then? Even something that might sound like normal chatter, something you'd typically not find memorable?" Remus could see that Dora was in Auror mode, for all that her cotton nightgown was covered in various improbable colors of kittens.

"Actually, yes," he remembered. "Hermione said she thought the intensity of the bond wasn't possible from a curse or a hex or something."

"Mr. Lupin, don't you think that is the sort of statement I might have been looking for?" Dora said, sounding irritated.

"I understand, Investigator," Remus said, risking her pique to smile at her, given how adorable she was when she was irritated. "The bond, it's… _very_ overpowering. Hard to think through. My sincere apologies?"

"Hmm," Dora said again. Then, "So, a recap of August, taken as a whole: First, you discovered what you believe is your soulmate's scent, and followed it to the basement of a building," she said, winking. As an Auror, she would know better than to reveal _which_ building in case the enemy could somehow overhear. Horribly, that enemy was now her boss. "In that basement, the smell dissipated just as you opened the door to reveal Hermione Granger. Later, upstairs, you touched Ms. Granger and felt what you would term a typical reaction that denotes a soul bond, is that right?"

Remus wanted to object to the characterization of 'typical,' but he nodded.

"In the initial incident as observed, Ms. Granger appeared unaffected by the supposed soul bond, and eventually postulated that the two incidents were linked by a possible curse or hex generated by one Severus Snape, is that correct?"

Remus nodded again.

"Following this incident, you, the complainant, have experienced nightly events in the form of dreams of said incident?" Dora looked over for his nod, and then continued. "This dream varies from that incident on every repeat, as you have testified?" Suddenly, her serious expression dissolved away to giggles. "Remus, I just realized I could make my hair look like one of those awful caps from court! I don't dare, of course, but it never occurred to me until just now!" After looking over at his deep frown, she changed her hair color to black, then back to her signature pink.

"I'm out of Auror-y official questions," she explained. "Now it's brainstorming. You should know, I wanted to avoid that. I wanted the Dreams to quit and everything to go back to our peculiar brand of normal, but that's clearly fucked all to hell, so now we need to suss out why that is."

Remus really loved when she swore, especially when she wasn't swearing due to some sort of physical catastrophe, of which they'd experienced many in their time together. He didn't dare smile about that right now, though. Dora did _not_ appreciate his appreciation of her occasional potty mouth.

"So, in the grand tradition of brainstorming?" he said, looking to her for guidance.

"Well, the first question to answer would be to ask what you personally think is going on," she said. The way she said it was with the same body language as she had when she got home after a long day and removed her shoes-some annoying weight finally relieved. He guessed she'd been wanting to know for quite some time.

"The longer it goes the more I am unsure," Remus admitted, "but at first it did track with a detailed, well-designed curse-and Severus is very good at those."

"That's true," Dora said. "But?"

"But, I think Dream Hermione was echoing the suspicion I've had in the last week," Remus said. "The detail and intensity, all the various different elements? That is just too much to fold into a single spell, especially one that triggered without the caster's presence. I don't see how that would be possible even if he'd been standing there casting directly at me."

"What about the _Cruciatus_ Curse? There's a lot of intensity there."

"There is, but that's all down to nerves," Remus said, feeling the urge toward the professorial and trying to quash it. Now was not the time for a lecture, even if the subject was fascinating, in a morbid way. "It's a single step: stimulate agony. Yes, there's an emotional component to that, but the agony prompts it by its very nature. With this, there was a scent, a physical rush of sensation, an emotional component, and now, weeks' worth of dreams. That is quite a few steps, with complex interactions woven into them."

"So, there's more to it than a curse?" Dora said, in that way she had sometimes of boiling an issue down to a simple statement.

"I… maybe? I just-" Remus broke off, and Dora finished the thought for him.

"-don't like what that might mean?"

"Exactly."

"Me either, but Moody always said, 'Nosy and alive is better than polite and dead!'"

"Profoundly cheerful, he was," Remus said. He gladly followed his instinct to hug her, rubbing her back in soothing circles.

"Well now that I have two miserable topics to choose from, let's press on," she said, wiping her eyes on his shirtsleeve. "What? Mine's sleeveless!" she said defensively after he raised a disapproving eyebrow at her.

"What do _you_ think is going on, dear?" he asked.

"I reserve the right to tell you once we're done brainstorming," she said unexpectedly. He didn't have a chance to examine her facial expression for clues as she leaned over to retrieve his pillow. She placed it against the headboard beside him and leaned back, crossing one leg over and resting her calf against the other knee.

Her toenails were neon green.

"Hasn't toenail polish got fumes that aren't so healthy for-" he started to ask, but she answered him wordlessly by changing the color at a snap of her fingers.

"I don't have to snap, you know, but it just seems cooler, doesn't it?" she asked, pointedly (to his estimation) ignoring his concern about the baby. "No fumes! Moving on!"

"You've got probably less than a month before that kind of contortionist leg folding will be impossible, I think," he said mildly.

"Baby Lupin will be just fine, Mr. Worrywart, but he or she appreciates your concern, as does his or her mother," Dora said, kissing his cheek. "Nice try at subject changing. SO! Let's look at this methodically," she said, raising her wand to cast a spell that brought over a quill and a notebook. "Ooh, it's one of your self-inking ones!"

"I make sure those are the only ones in the bedroom, since my note-taking wife left the ink pot on my side of the bed once or twice," Remus commented casually.

"Smart of you!" Dora said, undaunted. "So let's say it's not a curse. What about the evidence we already have would lead to a different conclusion?"

"What do you-" Remus started to say before he realized. "Oh, you're suggesting it is real? Nymphadora…"

"We've faced worse, haven't we? Death? Profound loss?"

"Dora!" Remus groaned, the ache in his heart almost too much to speak. He'd managed to forget the panic he'd felt when Hermione had pulled away from him, when she'd metaphorically cut away the possibility of their soul bond with knife-like precision. That feeling was rushing back like a Muggle steamroller he'd seen once as a child. He had imagined himself trapped beneath it, no wand, no one around but helpless Muggles, as it slowly rolled up and crushed his breath away.

"Remus, my love, what-you need to trust me, here. We need to do this, we must figure this out, all right? Let's know what we're up against, and _then_ deal with it?" He could hear the wobble in her voice, and that gave him the strength he didn't have for himself.

"All right," he said, clearing his throat. "What would change? Lucky for me I have multiple memories of it to compare, thanks to the Dreams. Who would have foreseen finding a positive in that!"

Dora handed him a square of chocolate that was in his mouth before he'd even really registered what she'd done. He gave her a thin smile.

"That does help," he told her. "Let me think for a minute."

He'd never dwelled on the Dreams. There was an undercurrent of something, maybe best described as potential spell power, that was always there under the surface. He'd decided it was the memory of what the soul bond felt like. It felt almost like he had a second system of arteries and veins, carrying emotional weight instead of life blood. He was afraid that if he poked at that too much, if he questioned its presence, that he wouldn't like what he found there. At first, he had feared that he was carrying around some macabre Snape calling card embedded in his own psyche. Now, he feared something else entirely.

In his head, Remus arranged his memories like parchment, each one a different iteration of the Dream. He pulled away, made himself an observer, and tried to look for differences. There were some (Dora's reactions were varied and horrible, every single miserable one of them), but after about five minutes, he caught on to something that was the same in every one of them. The strangeness of it wasn't in the Dreams at all-it was in their comparison to the real thing.

"In most of the Dreams-maybe _all_ of the Dreams-Hermione was every bit as shocked and bewildered as I was," Remus blurted out.

"How do you know she wasn't like that on the day?" Dora asked.

"No Pensieve." His voice was as harsh and uncompromising a deterrence as he could make it.

"I didn't ask, dearest, you know I wouldn't," Dora protested. "You did say your eyes were closed, though, didn't you?"

"Yes, but, her tone, her behavior, they all weren't consistent with being gobsmacked, Dora," Remus said, unable to hide the rush of exasperation.

"What if she wasn't gobsmacked?"

"The bond-"

"No, Remus, really-what would it mean if she wasn't gobsmacked?" Dora said. She leaned forward, clearly trying to focus his attention, but the action caused the pillow at her back to start slipping off of the bed. She went to catch it, and to no one's surprise, ended up falling off of the bed.

This wasn't Remus's first World Cup, so he leaned over to lay himself down, peering over the edge at her.

"What would it mean?" she repeated. She'd landed face first on the pillow, somehow, and so her voice was muffled a bit.

"Are you saying-"

"She already knew. It's the only explanation, Remus," Dora said, rolling over and making eye contact.

Remus was stunned. The implications of this were too much. He looked down at Dora with wide eyes, watched as her steady, shocked gaze turned slowly into a resignation and sorrow that he refused to witness. Instead, he traced his eyes over her, registering that her stomach was swelling ever so slightly. He shook his head, and a tear tore loose and landed on Dora's nightgown, right over her heart.

"No," he said, feeling like every possible emotion on the spectrum was affecting him at once.

"Not only did she know, but she'd have to be actively hiding it," Dora whispered. "A spell, or a potion?"

"Potion," Remus said, his voice cracking against the lump in his throat. "The basement. It's a potions lab."

"Merlin!" Dora shouted. "The soulmate outline! Hermione had an outline, she gave it to me… _Merlin_, months and months ago! One of the things it said was that the Wolfsbane potion dulls your senses."

"This is all just conjecture, Dora, we've still got other things to talk through, don't we?" Remus said, rolling over onto his back. His voice sounded to his own ears as if it were coming out of one of the Weasleys' Sneakoscopes, all distorted and overloud.

"Remus! You can't just ignore the-" She'd started at a yell, but Dora stopped short, so short that his head jerked around to look for her, thinking she'd fallen again when the sound of her voice cut off so quickly. She hadn't; in fact, she was standing up and brushing the quill she'd forgotten to use off of the skirt of her nightgown. "I tell you what, my dar-" Dora stopped again, her eyes filling with tears so fast it was as if they'd been hexed. "Let's sleep on it?"

He nodded, afraid to speak, and opened his arms for her. They hugged, quick and tight, and set about righting the bedclothes. When they were done, they both got into bed and settled in as if it weren't past the middle of the night and into pre-dawn. As if they hadn't just maybe found out something that would chase them away from each other as surely as the sun would chase away the darkness in just a few hours' time.

As he slept, for the first time in a full month, Remus did not have the Dream.


	7. The Weight of the World

Hermione lay still and listened. The tent was quiet but for the ragged sound of Ron's breathing and the beating of her own heart. Harry was outside standing guard, and Hermione could admit that she was too angry at herself to join him. She'd gone into what Ron had called 'Mom Mode' as soon as they'd arrived in the woods, recognizing his injury and treating it with Dittany as soon as she could. She'd had spent the month at Grimmauld Place going through every kind of preparation possible, and thus had all manner of carefully brewed potions all spelled imperturbable in her magical bag. As a result, Ron would sleep better than they would have expected to, under the circumstances. She'd taken the time to find the good ingredients and the non habit forming pain elixirs, but it all really boiled down to the fact that he shouldn't have needed them. After all, it wasn't an attack that had harmed him-no Death Eater spell had felled Ron Weasley. No, Hermione had failed Ron, she knew that, but the best she could tell herself was that she hadn't _continued_ to fail him, and for now, that meant to world to her.

A quiet chirping noise caught her attention. It was time to check Ron's temperature, and Hermione cast a silent spell to quiet the charmed trinket and got up. She could have cast a series of spells she'd learned from a medical textbook to check his temperature automagically, alerting her if it showed any deviance from normal, but that felt too impersonal. Besides, she'd known she wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, so there wasn't any point in pretending otherwise.

Hermione cast a _Muffliato_ charm on herself, loathe to cause Ron the discomfort-even a passing one-of waking to the sound of footsteps. The tent was roomy, something she was happy to have magically budgeted for, despite the effort it had taken to prepare the tent with spells and enchantments. It meant that Ron had an actual bed, unlike the cot or even sleeping bag that he and Harry had assumed they would be adjusting to. Hermione became misty-eyed as she recalled a moment two weeks before when Ron had caught her in an unexpected side-hug.

"Thanks for being so… _Hermione_ about all of this," he'd said, flushing red as he clearly realized his phrasing left a bit to be desired. He'd then started stammering out an apology, but Hermione had simply turned and hugged him full-on.

"You're worth it, Ron. Both of you are," she'd said to him, touched by his honesty.

"That's what I'm saying, Hermione-_you_ are worth it, too."

"You're worth better, Ron," Hermione whispered now, muted by the _Muffliato_. It was still important to say aloud, though. She'd taken her ridiculous blue potion again an hour ago, and she felt better today than she had the night before, but Hermione had a decision to make.

Tell them? Don't tell them? Wait and tell them once she'd determined the magical treatment was working, and they all had less to worry about? Or, disastrously, wait to tell them after a second failure? _Would_ such a failure happen again? Did she have any chance of stopping it?

Hermione stopped short of asking the ultimate question, because that just couldn't even bear asking. She wasn't going to break up a marriage just because of some magical predestination, at least, not until she'd exhausted all over avenues.

Ron groaned in his sleep, and Hermione hovered over him, stopping herself from casting anything to ease him, but only just.

She'd meddled enough.

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The next day, after Ron had the last of the food they had brought with them on zero notice, they sat near his bed and looked at the locket, passing it between them.

"It's almost… pulsing," Harry said.

"...seems alive, in there," Ron finished, at the exact same time.

"It's part of the reason he's not gone, so that makes sense, in a way," Hermione pointed out. "Doesn't make it less creepy, though."

"Even if we had a basilisk fang to stab it with, I don't think that would work quite the right way," Harry said next.

"Yeah, I feel like it would, I don't know, fight back," Ron said, rubbing at his chest with his good arm. "Like you'd stab at it, and somehow it would slip in your grip and you've suddenly stabbed your other hand."

"I'd definitely like us to have some distance from it, on that score," Hermione said. "No destroying a horcrux while you're wearing it, this time." In an odd way, she almost felt like crossing herself, like her father's mum liked to do when speaking of the dead. She could tell her other two friends were also thinking of Dumbledore in that moment, and from her perch at the end of Ron's sick bed, Hermione nudged Harry's leg with her shoe.

"You ok?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, putting paid to the lie by grimacing and shaking his head. "All right. No," he admitted. "Wearing it is… strange. I don't feel right. I don't want to try anything with it yet, though, not 'till Ron is up to more than protecting his dignity fertilizing the ferns just outside."

"Oi," Ron said, fighting back a laugh. "You could do with fertilizing a bit less often, you know. Hermione's doing her best with her air freshening spells, but, whew!"

"It's only been 24 hours!" Hermione said in exasperation. "You know what? Well on your way to recovery, that's how I'm taking this. Well on your way," she said, cheerfully and gratefully taking up her assigned task of night guard a full 45 minutes early.

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Five days later, Ron was feeling much better, but Hermione had fallen ill again. They swapped places, with Ron taking the smaller bed closer to the tent's entrance, and Hermione in the large, lush bed piled up with blankets and pillows. She'd protested, but neither Ron nor Harry were interested in letting her argue, and so she woke on the sixth day feeling like she had a raging hippogriff sitting on her chest.

Hermione didn't have much time to feel sorry for herself-or guilty, for that matter, because she knew that her sickness was magically generated, and she wasn't willing to even _think_ about a possible cure. Ron and Harry had been at loggerheads for two days, and this morning, their fight came to a boiling point.

"-taking more than we need!" Harry came stomping into the tent, yelling the words over his shoulder.

"_I'm_ being irresponsible? _Me?!_ Well that's bloody rich!" Ron said, coming in barely a pace behind.

Hermione craned her neck from her nest of blankets to see which one of them was wearing the locket this morning. The three of them had realized it held a commanding sense of foreboding and anger inside it only a few days into taking refuge in the woods, when Harry'd been unable to cast his Patronus while out gathering food. The double worry of Dementor patrols and the oppressive force of the horcrux had kept their spirits low, and things had only gotten worse from there.

"If you don't tell me where you've gone, you can't blame me if I go to the same place when it's my turn!" Ron hollered, spinning in a half-circle and shaking his hands in outrage. The horcrux lay against his chest, its diabolical weight barely shifting despite the way Ron twisted and turned. Everything about it felt unnatural and wrong to Hermione, and she hadn't been allowed to wear it for over 36 hours.

"Whose fault is it if you don't ask, you great big oaf!" Harry roared back. He was unloading the supplies he'd gotten, having sold one of the trinkets Hermione had found hiding in her bottomless bag. Harry had already thrown off one rucksack, which had bounced out a loaf of bread, thankfully uncrushed. Another came tumbling after, and this one wasn't as lucky. Harry had carelessly thrust it over his shoulder onto the floor as he shouted, and it landed, hard. After a minute, clear goo started leaking from the top gap in the canvas.

"I hate to interrupt," Hermione said, the weakness in her voice coming as a personal shock. "But, you didn't happen to get eggs, Harry, did you?"

"What?!" Harry said, rounding on her. When he saw that it had been Hermione who was speaking, his face turned ashen, and she saw that he was finally startled out of the haze of anger the horcrux had clearly bewitched him with. "Merlin, Hermione, I'm so sorry," Harry said.

"Tell that to Ron's stomach, I know you got him the eggs. I'm not terribly fond," Hermione said mildly.

"To hell with Ron's stomach," Harry said, but the true venom of his anger had mostly drained away.

"Give it to me, Harry. Right now," Hermione directed.

"What?" Ron said, coming up behind Harry and seeing the mess of canvas bags and egg goop. "Oh, shite. Harry, mate, I don't even remember why I was so angry."

"That's because it wasn't all genuine," Hermione said, sitting up and coughing away some of the phlegm that was making her voice so thready. "Give it over."

"What, the eggs?" Harry said, and Hermione suppressed a sigh. It wasn't Harry's fault, she reminded herself. The horcrux was manipulating him, and it was damn good at it, enough to make him dim simply because that would infuriate Hermione.

"The horcrux, Harry. It's long past my turn."

"I thought we agreed tha-" he started, but Hermione shook her head.

"That was before the two of you started fighting like rival hinkypunks," she said, letting some of her annoyance and frustration bleed into her tone of voice. "We're too close, the three of us, not to see what's happening! Bickering is one thing, but it's gotten to the point where it's going to damage friendships. The venom needs to be diluted, and the best way to do that is to split it three ways," she argued. "You know I'm right."

"Yes, I know you're right," Harry said with a sigh of his own. "Just now I felt like I didn't just want to punch Ron, I wanted to see him bleed. I almost…" he stopped for a minute, taking the locket off and stumbling a bit, as though adjusting to the loss of its weight. "I almost _longed_ for it."

Hermione reached out and took the locket. It felt alluringly light, as if it were trying to persuade her that it was no burden at all. She draped it across her chest and reached up to do the clasp. It was fiddly and confusing, and before she knew it she was cursing under her breath, her arms growing weak and tired from being held up behind her head.

"Nice try, Lord Git," Ron said to the locket, coming over and lifting his eyebrows in an unspoken offer to help.

"Thank you, Ron." Hermione nodded at him, and together they got it fastened. Hermione let her arms fall to her sides in relief, but she was soon lifting them again to blow her nose for a solid five minutes.

Harry looked up from the floor where he was busy cleaning up the mess he'd made of their supplies. "Before that thing kicks in all the way," he started, using a placating tone that told Hermione he was expecting her to be unhappy with what he said next, "I think that potion you've been taking from McGonagall isn't working well enough. I want to tell you that now, before you've been wearing the horcrux for very long and while I'm not wearing it."

Hermione felt indignant and defensive. Instead of trusting the negativity of those emotions, she stuck to the plan she'd come up with the first time she'd hung the nasty necklace around her neck: if the emotion she felt was negative, react in the exact opposite way.

"You're probably right, Harry," she said, feeling an immediate sense of guilt following the words. "I need to tell you something you might already know: I'm not telling you everything about my being sick. I feel like... oh, it's hard to figure out the right way to put this," she said, picking up her wand and disappearing the last half-hour's worth of snotted tissues. "This horrid thing will take any weakness in our friendships and exploit it."

"I resemble that remark rather painfully, I think," Harry said, glancing over at Ron, who was slicing bread in preparation for lunch.

"This whole sickness nonsense is complicated and tangled and it's totally going to get worse before it gets better," Hermione said, allowing herself the luxury of sounding as frustrated as she felt, as while that was a negative emotion, it was one she'd been feeling ever since she'd confirmed her very worst fears about Lupin.

"I'll be on the lookout for that being a, what does Uncle Vernon call it? A 'hot button issue.'" Harry reassured her. Hermione felt a surge of affection for her friend that felt like a victory against the ripped soul she was wearing caged against her chest. She reveled in it, smiling at him and pointing to the horcrux.

"Is it a good idea to antagonize it, do you think?" Ron asked. "Isn't the fact that you love us kind of, I dunno, ammo?"

"Unfortunately, it has all the ammo against me it needs, thanks to the thing I haven't told you," she said, pressing her palms into her eye sockets to try to stave off getting emotional. "The love is just a bonus for when you're wearing it."

"Well, go on," Harry said.

Hermione took a deep breath and started talking in a headlong rush. "Right. It turns out I'm Remus Lupin's soulmate, and you find out by touch if the other ways to find out fail-and they did fail, it's kind of amazing how many times they failed, actually-and I'd known about it and was trying to hide it, except he touched my hand that day at Grimmauld, and-"

"Woah, woah, woah," Ron interrupted.

"Wait, _what_?!" Harry stared at her.

"I'm so sorry!" Hermione said, feeling utterly wretched.

"First of all, Hermione, I don't know how distorted your thinking is wearing that thing, yet, but Ron and I know you'd never do anything that deliberately hurt the Order, or your friends," Harry said, and Ron nodded, coming close and pointing to the bed, asking if he could sit with her. Hermione moved one of the extra pillows aside to make room.

"Yeah, hey, that might be the right way to do this, actually," Ron said suddenly, pointing to Harry. "You said 'I don't know how distorted your thinking is,' and that's it. More of us aren't wearing it at a time, right? So you tell us everything you're thinking, the things you're ashamed of, and we'll tell you how wrong it is. We balance you back out!"

Hermione _hated_ the idea, but because she knew her thoughts were already altered by the locket's hatefulness, and because she could see how encouraged Harry looked, how proud Ron looked to have come up with the idea, she knew it was probably a solid plan. Both of her companions were looking to her for her opinion, and she somehow knew, with perfect clarity, that if she used a derisive tone, if she rolled her eyes and mocked the idea, even though they knew she was wearing the locket and shouldn't be trusted, they'd take her advice. She _knew_ she could destroy Ron's idea and destroy his confidence, and it wouldn't even take much.

"I have the strongest feeling that I ought to simply destroy your idea, Ron. That means it's a fantastic plan," Hermione said quietly. She smiled as brightly as she could at Ron, wishing she could feel true happiness in the pride on his face, but the locket was punishing her with its weight against her chest and in her mind. "That refuting the wrong thoughts thing is perfect. It's so perfect I might throw up with how hard the locket is fighting against it!"

Harry moved to grab a cup and enlarge it with magic into a bucket for her, and Ron reached out to squeeze her hand in reassurance. He opened his mouth to say something, and both Harry and Hermione stopped him.

'No, it's not your turn yet,' they both said, each with variations of their own phrasing.

"Right, so in keeping with your suggestion, Ron, I will tell you that I've been holding back about the soulmate thing. Partly because I don't want to believe it, despite all the evidence I have to tell me it really is true," Hermione admitted, reaching up to lift the locket with a bit of difficulty from against her bare chest, under her shirt, to resting over it, with fabric between her skin and the metal. "And partly because of how utterly guilty I feel about it."

"Why?" Ron asked, sounding shocked at the concept. "I mean, soulmates are super rare, and there's real power in them. The kind of power someone like You Know Who can't order someone to give him!"

Hermione didn't have time to take her calming breaths and stop herself before she responded. "Because he's _married,_ idiot! It's completely ridiculous, anyway. He's twice my age, in love with someone else, and-"

"Good sharing on the distorted thinking, Hermione," Harry interrupted, a mix of sympathy and mischief on his face.

She started to cry, then, hating the way she wasn't certain of her own emotions. Crying made her sneeze, which just reminded her of why she was sick in the first place, which was a confession that still needed to be made. Hermione made a noise that she hoped sounded enough like 'thank you' to let Harry know she did appreciate his interruption, despite all outward appearances.

"I know this is hard because you don't want to be convinced, whether or not you're wearing that thing, am I right?" Harry said. He hadn't sat down next to her again after getting the bucket, and now he walked over to grab both of her hands with a firm grip that didn't let her pull away, despite the fact that she needed to wash up.

She nodded.

"Is there more you haven't said?" Harry asked, then.

Hermione nodded again. "Min- Professor McGonagall thinks that it's why I'm sick. Soulmate magic is…" she trailed off, looking for the right word and feeling like the influence of the horcrux around her neck was ruining her vocabulary. All the words she could think of were negative. "It's greedy," she gave up and said. "It's pulling me toward him, and she thinks it's pulling him toward me, as well."

"So wherever he is right now, Lupin's sick too?" Ron asked.

"Probably. I convinced him that the soulmate bond we both felt flaring up on contact was a curse, though, so he likely has no idea why he feels so awful. If only I could have stayed far enough away from him that he couldn't touch me!" Hermione said, groaning and throwing herself back on the pile of pillows. They felt good, and she wanted to throw them. Being conflicted like this was the _worst_ feeling.

"Ron, you said soulmate bonds enhance magic, right?" Harry said.

"I mean, I'm not an expert or anything, but yeah, it's not just in Ginny's trashy romance novels, it's in textbooks and things," Ron answered, rubbing the back of his neck in a clear sign of discomfort. His ears were bright red. "It's like a magnifier of power."

"Hermione, this is important. You are one of the most powerful witches I know of, and this might be a chance to _enhance_ that?" Harry's eyes were wide. "This isn't something to hide, not that you can hide it that much anymore anyway, right? So we should track him down, shouldn't we? So you can get better?"

"Better, and then _better,"_ Ron added.

Hermione could feel her embarrassment and misery just magnifying, and it had to be showing on her face, because Harry walked around the bed and crouched near Hermione's head where she was still lying back, overwhelmed.

"Even if he doesn't know, Hermione, your magic clearly knows, or you wouldn't be sick. That's what Professor McGonagall said, isn't it?" She nodded. "That means _his_ magic knows."

Oddly, Hermione didn't feel any extra attack, any additional misery on top of how she already felt, associated with the locket. Even a half hour into wearing it, she usually got a sense of the divide, and how it was modifying her emotions. Right now, though, it was quiescent, and that was both frightening and empowering.

Did the locket fear the idea of unlocking all of that power, or was it lying still in hopes that she could manage to do it, find Remus and bind herself to him, and thus destroy the Order of the Phoenix and the resistance against He Who Must Not Be Named?

Hermione realized that Harry was right, though. She wasn't the only bearer of this secret anymore, and even if Harry and Ron hadn't realized Ron's injury was her fault yet, they could see how sick she was. Hermione doubted that Ron, Harry, or Minerva would be willing to allow Remus and Hermione to waste away, apart from each other, not when there was a chance to use the bond to their advantage.

She hadn't read much about the benefits of the soul bond in detail, and she hadn't read _anything_ about how to certify or complete the bond, if there was such a practice. As Ron and Harry continued speaking to each other about other things, Hermione closed her eyes and tried not to feel guilty. Perhaps there was a way to be in close physical proximity to Remus without needing to destroy the life he had with Tonks? It was worth a try, she decided. Maybe Tonks would understand.

Hermione was sleepy, and as she drifted off, she realized that she hadn't felt any malevolent influence from the locket in the thoughts about Remus and Tonks. She wondered if there was a reason for that, but was too far gone, sleep-wise, to care.


	8. Soul Searching

**note: **This chapter basically wrote itself. I can't post this fast ordinarily, but I needed to write this, apparently! So enjoy.

The next morning, Hermione woke in the dark to the sound of Harry making muffled, frightened noises. She got up, feeling wobbly but at least somewhat mobile, and used her dim _Lumos_ spell to light her way to where Harry was sleeping. His bed was empty, and Hermione felt a stab of irritation to realize that he was meant to be on watch. Ron had retrieved the locket from Hermione while she was sleeping, which had meant a good deal to her, given how much of a burden it was to wear. Now, Harry was outside on watch sleeping?

"Harry!" Hermione said, shaking him awake, and shivering. The night wasn't as cold as it would be in the coming months, but the wind was brisk, and her feet were bare.

Harry came awake with a start, and his eyes were so full of fear that she felt instant sympathy for him. Then, his hand raced up to rub at his scar, and Hermione realized what must have happened. Harry wasn't practicing Occlumency enough. He wasn't pushing the intrusions enough. As difficult a responsibility as she knew Occlumency was, Hermione was deeply disappointed in him. He was just being _lazy._

"Another vision?" she asked him, trying (and failing) to sound supportive.

He nodded. "I still keep seeing the same golden-haired guy, the one from the other wandmaker's murder."

"You know I want what's best for you, right?" she asked, pausing to blow her nose on the tissue she brought out with her. "Heaven knows I've made some stupid mistakes," she added, meaning to soften the blow of her criticism. She had spoken the statements out of order, though, she saw that as soon as the words left her mouth. Harry's face hardened, the missed sleep and fear magnifying on his face.

"Yeah, well the best help you can be right now is to stand watch," he said, looking her up and down. Hermione was wearing comfortable sleep clothes and a bathrobe, she had her wand, and she was sure she looked just as capable as a young man who got nightmares of a tyrant who liked to kill innocent people. "I'll get your slippers?"

"Yes, thank you," Hermione said. She wasn't going to argue with him. Keeping watch was much harder with the locket, so much so that they'd agreed not to put anyone on watch at night while wearing it. There was too much chance at being tricked into saying or doing something terrible. Given the choice between keeping watch at night or wearing the locket and trying to sleep, even feeling so ill, Hermione would always choose to stand watch.

They would need to move, soon. Ideally, they'd look for Remus, but Hermione was all for finding a place to stay where they could eat without worrying so much about being caught for stealing food. As she usually did on watch, Hermione sat and chanted the names of each offensive spell and what color they appeared when cast, to try to keep the colors and spells fresh in her memory, for the next time she'd need to remember them.

After three hours, the sun started to rise, and she heard Ron and Harry bickering. At least they were arguing about how best to pack up, which was comforting in its own way. Their arguments often got trivially physical, though, so Hermione decided to stay outside. Ron and Harry's voices rose and fell, but the next time they rose, the subject had changed.

"PLATONIC SOULMATES, are you KIDDING me?!" Harry's voice shouted.

Hermione had been resting against a tree, and on hearing that, she quickly rounded the tree so that it was between her and the tent. She could hear Harry berating Ron further, but the words weren't as clear as his shouted statement. She covered her face with her hands, rubbing the snot leaking out from underneath her nose with the tissue she seemed to always need to carry, now.

She'd wondered, sometimes, if Ron's feelings toward her were, well… _different _than Harry's were. His blasè reaction to her soulmate admission had felt like a spot of luck, at the time.

"But they don't HAVE to! He's MARRIED!" came Ron's angry shout from the tent.

Hermione groaned. Platonic soulmates sounded like the _best idea ever_ right about now. She had been hoping there was some sort of an arrangement she could come to that would basically result in that exact kind of situation. Was Harry in there dismantling both _her_ hopes _and_ Ron's?

She didn't want to know. She really, _really_ didn't want to know.

The next two weeks were eventful in ways that, in retrospect, Hermione could have done without. They moved three separate times, once to a different part of the forest, then to London, looking for clues in the orphanage that Tom Riddle had lived in. Despite knowing it wouldn't be much of a cure, Harry and Ron agreed that Hermione should continue to take the blue potion to help with her symptoms. While in London and in disguise as middle-aged wizards, Harry and Ron had overheard a discussion in hushed voices about a radio program that encouraged resistance to He Who Must Not Be Named. Both of them had returned with renewed enthusiasm and determined to obtain a radio.

Despite their knowledge of how the horcrux attempted to turn them against each other, and the Ron's suggestion to tell each other of the insidious things it led them to believe, interpersonally, things were getting tough. So despite having been left behind to clean while the two of them had gone out for food, even Hermione was uplifted by the idea of a resistance program they could tune into.

The only problem was that Harry was adamant that they only had three days to find a wireless with which to tune in. Hermione hadn't been there to overhear, but what she gathered from Ron and Harry's excited explanations was that each program required the listener to speak a password and tap their wand on the device in order to tune in. They had this week's password, Padfoot, which was the overheard word that had caused Harry to zero in on the clandestine conversation in the first place. Harry was almost manic in his determination to find a radio, and when he showed back up after a food run to take the locket from Ron's neck on the morning of the third day, his enthusiasm gave Hermione pause.

"You stole one," she guessed, as Harry did up the clasp in one try. His elegant shrug was infuriating, but they fought enough as it was without her picking a fight with him now. Harry took the pilfered wireless radio out of his rucksack and set it down, saying the word 'Padfoot' and tapping it with his wand. Nothing happened, but it was also early afternoon.

"Soon, right? No stress," Ron said.

There was, in fact, stress.

They got through the two separate arguments, though, and Hermione had recently taken a dose of her BBAASSCC, so she was a bit less sick than usual, so when the wireless sparked to life and the program came on, everyone was in relatively good spirits, for once.

_Welcome yet again to Potterwatch, listeners! River here, yet again apologizing for our sporadic broadcasts, but let me remind you that spontaneity is a spice of life! In the five or so days since our last chat, we have not heard of any major developments in death and destruction, for which we are grateful to the Grand Mean One's incompetent henchmen and women._

Ron and Harry shot each other pleased looks. They clearly recognized Lee Jordan's voice from when he called the plays at their Quidditch matches in school.

_Today we had planned to have a visit from our good friend Romulus, but he has caught a rather nasty illness that I can only conclude has come from being within 200 kilometers of Severus Snape's nose hairs! I'm sure all of our listeners will wish him a swift recovery._

Hermione walked away from the radio to stand over by the entrance to the tent on hearing this. She had started to see her time since she'd discovered that she was Remus Lupin's soulmate as if she were on some sort of winding pathway. Initially she'd thought she could choose the way she walked on it, avoiding pitfalls and risky rope bridges on her journey through the wilderness, but it was all a ruse. There was only one end point, it seemed, and each of the routes she tried to take only gave the _impression_ of autonomy. Hearing about Lupin's illness was just another waypoint on the journey, another confirmation that she was still a pawn in fate's game for them.

They were both sick. This couldn't continue. She had important things to do, and Remus had a child on the way, he probably also had missions to carry out. Whatever his missions were, though, they probably couldn't be as important as hers with Harry and Ron. The horcruxes were the key to defeating Tom, as Harry had started to call him, mimicking Dumbledore's occasional references. Hermione was going to have to remedy her illness the only way she knew would work, and that was to find Remus and stay within close physical proximity of him. Minerva had told her this was the bare minimum of what she and Remus would need to do so that their magic stopped reaching for each other.

It looked like Remus would get his wish. He was going to have to come with them.

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Hermione was wearing the locket on September eighteenth when she realized something. The first realization led to a second, but only the first one made her feel as stupid as a first year potion's student without a cauldron.

The use of the Patronus charm as a messenger was meant to be sparing, she knew, but the fact that she hadn't thought to send one to Remus instead of _searching the land_ for him like an adventurer on a noble quest made her feel like a complete idiot. She had chalked this up to the mental dimness that was affecting all three of them, thanks to having to wear the Horcrux for now.

Remus Lupin was not wearing a horcrux, though.

Her anger at him was short lived, though, because Hermione had done a bang-up job convincing him that their encounter was a curse-manufactured anomaly. She also felt like all of the members of the Order were doing their best to keep from signaling where she and the others were.

So to find Remus and hopefully stop the slow leeching away of her magical powers, all Hermione needed to do was to find a good middle ground kind of location, cast her Patronus with a message to Remus to meet her there, and then show up there. The only obstacle left after that would be to… confess to her soulmate that she'd figured out their connection and hidden it as if she had the right to make such a decision for him?

The complete lack of a doubled sense of guilt and recrimination coming from her own head and the locket made Hermione call Harry and Ron in from where they had been finishing some tent repairs.

"Is it possible to confuse a horcrux?" she asked without preamble.

"If I don't know the answer, do I have to skip lunch?" Ron asked. He smiled at her in the way she knew meant that he was only serious if the answer was yes, and totally kidding if the answer was no.

"You don't have to skip lunch," she said, feeling a surge of irritation that she knew was _all_ from the locket. "The locket thinks you should starve to death at my hand, in case you were wondering."

"Wicked," Ron said, taking the sandwich she'd just finished and had offered him. They had started this game of sarcastic enthusiasm about the invalid, distorted horcrux thoughts a few days ago when simply telling each other what they were had started to hurt feelings.

"Why is it confused?" Harry asked, waiting for his sandwich with perfect patience, except for the growling stomach noises.

"It doesn't seem to care whether I look for Remus," Hermione told him, raising an eyebrow and looking at his stomach. "It has an opinion on _everything._ Right now I feel like telling you if you can't wait for the damned sandwich you can make it yourself, like you have control over what noises you make when hungry."

"Well, I suppose I could have eaten breakfast, that would have made it less loud," Harry admitted.

"Harry!" Hermione said, distressed. She'd been thinking he might have been skipping meals here and there, with the rationale that she was soul sick and Ron was recovering from a nasty splinching, but he'd done it so expertly that she hadn't noticed all that much.

"Can I distract you _and_ make you feel better, all at the same time?" Harry asked her with an impudent smile. She wanted to punch it right off of his face, and told him so. "Violent, nice," was his response to her horcrux-encouraged impulse.

"Cheer me up, Harry, because the only thing worse than a lust for your best friends' blood at the slightest provocation is when it feels like I'm being encouraged by this awful thing," Hermione said, gesturing to her chest. She'd wrapped the locket in a tissue to keep it from touching her skin, even though it somehow kept breaking through with the 'friction' of its movement along her chest, even though it _only_ moved when it was wrapped in a tissue.

"It's encouraging you because it knows when the full moon is, that's my explanation," Harry said with a mouthful of bread and cheese. "It's four days from now."

"And we're in a tent in the woods, with zero protection for a werewolf," Hermione finished for him. "Oh no!" she said, following that reasoning to its natural conclusion. "Could that mean that once we're near each other again, we can't be separated? Or is that too much nuance for a soul fragment?"

"Wouldn't you know, with all the research you've done?" Ron said. "You're thorough the way dogs licking their-"

"_Ron!"_ both Hermione and Harry shouted at once.

"Bad analogy, got it," Ron said, wincing.

"It's like being around this thing is destroying everyone's brain to mouth filter," Harry said, nudging Ron roughly with his elbow.

"I admit to being _willfully ignorant_ when it came to the benefits of soul bonds," Hermione said primly, deciding to completely ignore Ron's disgusting comment. "I had no intention of participating in one, so I didn't see the point."

"I'm calling cancel on any questioning of motives while wearing the locket. Also, it's my turn for the locket, so don't question my motives," Harry said, grinning.

A dual surge of affection and disgust coursed through Hermione's veins, and she embraced one and rejected the other. She allowed Harry to unclasp the chain, and then helped him re-do it on his on back.

"Thanks, mate. Feeling utter shit today, after making the tent hole worse." Ron said in a glum voice.

"Wow, this thing…" Harry said, looking down at his chest, then at Ron with a shocked expression.

"That bad, eh?" Ron asked.

"Something about farts so bad they set fire to the tent, and the hole you are talking about was just a cover-up?" Harry said, snickering. "Though I have to be honest, it's been only a few seconds wearing this, so that might have just been from me."

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That night, Hermione started throwing up. It seemed that her time without Remus was up.

She was in no condition to send a Patronus message, but there was no way Hermione or Ron were going to allow Harry to carry out their plan, which was to send the Patronus and then wait in that vicinity for a response, so that they could expedite the response, as well as keep their location a secret. If all went well, the person they sent would bring Remus to the tent, instead of needing to give out their location in the message.

Hermione couldn't go. Harry couldn't go. Ron stood there, looking between the locket sitting on Harry's chest and the bucket Hermione was using to throw up in, an expression of hopelessness on his face.

"I don't want to do this," he told them, sorrow and resignation on his face. "I shouldn't tell you that. I should tell you that I'm willing to do _anything_ to make you better, Hermione, and I _am, _I promise, it's just that…" he broke off, scrubbing his face with his forearm, and Hermione couldn't tell if he had actually started to tear up or if that was an excuse to make a miserable face for the split second it was hidden from them.

"Ron, I didn't-" she started to say, but Harry grabbed her hand and squeezed it. The rest of her sentence, she realized, wasn't going to help. At all. _I didn't want this either._

Ron shut his eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them, he looked even more determined than he did, before. He also, somehow, looked _older._ "I wanted to be that for you. There, I said it. Now I'm going to go get him, so you can get better."

Hermione waited until Ron had left to burst into tears. She hadn't wanted to hurt Ron, and she had so much she wished she could tell him, but she _knew him,_ so, so well. Ronald Bilius Weasley wouldn't want her to bring it up. So she wouldn't. This would be another burden she'd have to carry, and she'd do it gladly, just as soon as she was done crying for the heart she hadn't even known might have been hers to break. That wasn't the only clear and present worry she had today, either.

Hermione was very worried that Remus would be in no condition to travel.

Ron had told Harry he would stay out as late as possible that day on the chance that Remus would send a message within hours. The longer it took for him to return, the more worried Harry and Hermione got, not the least of which was because Harry had flat-out _refused_ to give Hermione the locket while she was vomiting.

"I'm not going to get vomit on it, it clings to my skin like a magnet, Harry!" Hermione protested for the fifth time.

"It's interesting," Harry said in the conversational tone she recognized as the one he used for 'Horcrux Thoughts.' "I don't actually know if you'd throw up _more_ if I crammed this down your throat, or less!"

"I really think you're going to need to give it to me, Harry. I'm genuinely worried that you're going to get _actually_ violent. It's been ten hours."

"Oh, this thing is just relentless," Harry groaned. "I feel like I've got the tiny chain links of it embedded in my neck." He threw himself on the large, pillow-laden bed that they alternated sleeping on, and dug his fingers underneath the chain to hold it away from his skin. Then, he swore, and sucked on his finger.

"That's it. Give it over. I actually miss having feelings of wanting to kill you with non-sharp objects," Hermione said, reaching over to undo the clasp.

Harry actually _hissed_ at her when she pulled on the locket.

"Give over, Gollum," Hermione demanded. Harry let go.

"Wow, okay," he said, rubbing the red welt on his chest. "Don't know why it wanted to punish me for knowing who that is. You'd think a soul sliver from that person in particular would just not _know_ about Muggle literature. Is there some sort of Muggle facts detector, or does it have a mental checklist in there somewhere? 'Singe skin if wearer mentions any of the following: Hobbits,'" Harry said, rolling onto his back and laughing ruefully. It sounded like his chest _really_ hurt.

Hermione's horcrux wanted her to feel glad about that. She didn't.

"Aslan," Hermione supplied for Harry's list of Muggle characters. "Winnie the Pooh."

"Good one! Could you imagine what Eeyore would say wearing a _horcrux?!"_ Harry asked, laughing.

"'Thanks for noticin' me, if you didn't, I would have to feed you to the overly enthusiastic tiger,'" Hermione said in a dull, morose voice.

They both laughed, and Hermione grabbed her bucket, as the act of laughing reminded her body a bit too much of the diaphragm action involved in throwing up. Harry threw her a sympathetic look, and then held still, cocking his head to the side and listening for something she hadn't heard.

"Ron. Asking for help," he said after a few seconds, standing up and heading for the door to the tent.

"Be careful," Hermione yelled after him, ignoring the feeling of selfishness at being left alone, recognizing its origins as external. The flood of emotions that occurred next could have been either the locket or her own, though. She was basically _terrified_ at what Remus's reaction would be, and she realized that if she hadn't meddled at all, there would be no reason for him to be upset with her specifically.

Fate, destiny, or some other nebulous magical entity had been the one to choose them as soulmates, but Hermione's rejection of that had placed the target on her own back. After all, she was terribly sick, but _she knew why._ It was very possible that Remus hadn't connected his illness to the supposed curse that had struck on his entering #12 Grimmauld Place over a month ago. Tonks was probably frantic by now, worrying about him on top of being pregnant.

These thoughts were too much for her stomach, which despite being empty was still driven to try to expel its contents yet again. This time she had the presence of mind to move away from the fancy bed and away from the door. She was hunched over her bucket and half in tears when Remus was helped into the tent by Harry and Ron. She couldn't look at him. Guilt tasted like bile, for her, and when she was finally able to straighten up, she kept her back turned.

"Thank you," Lupin said behind her. He sounded very tired and weak, and Hermione closed her eyes tightly, tears welling out from beneath and around her eyelids.

Here was her cure, in the same room as she was. She just had to walk over and clasp his hand in hers, but she wasn't worthy of doing that. She should have just taken the locket and run, when they were all gone away from her. _She still could._

"Hermione, it's Ron's turn," Harry said, coming up behind her and curling an arm around her shoulder. Hermione looked at him, confused. "The locket. The horcrux, Hermione." She still shook her head at him, and then she felt Ron at her back, giving her a brief hug from behind before fumbling with the clasp of the locket. She felt desperate to hold onto it, despite only having worn it for less than thirty minutes, but Harry took her face in his hands and leaned his head into hers until they were eye to eye, scar to blank forehead.

"_Breathe,"_ he whispered to her.

Hermione couldn't feel the locket's removal, but she felt its influence rip away from her mind. As soon as it was gone, she wilted, but Harry was there, his hands swiftly moving from cradling her face to holding her upright.

"Let's help a friend, okay?" he asked her in a light tone of voice that gave every indication that he'd let her run away screaming if that was what she really needed to do. Harry was wearing his love and concern for her as a mantle, the threads of it weaving into his voice and the gentle way he was helping her. It was such a refreshing change from the thorny possessiveness of the horcrux that she threw her arms around him and squeezed, probably too tightly.

"You are just…" words failed her. She wanted to tell Harry how much he meant to her in that moment, when she was weak as a direct result of her own moral and intellectual failings. He'd been _born_ chosen, perhaps, but the prophecy couldn't have known what kind of a person he was, and she _did._ Everyone could take the Boy Who Lived and rip his effigy to shreds for all she cared. Her Harry Potter was more important than any symbol, and she took a second to hold him close to her and internally mourn the way most of the magical world would miss the best parts of him. "Thank you, Harry," Hermione said. It was all she could come up with.

"Ron?" she called out, turning toward the bed, toward where Lupin would be waiting. She wasn't putting that off, not really, but Ron was wearing the locket again, he'd taken that burden from her at a point when she'd been really vulnerable to it, and so she needed him to know what that meant, too.

Though what he said was most probably influenced by the demon necklace he wore, it was the most perfect way to bring her out of her haze of miserable gratitude.

"Hermione, whatever you're trying to say to me isn't as important as keeping me from having to smell any more vomit. Go hold Lupin's hand, all right? I've been here for five whole minutes and I kind of hate you right now."

Instead of bursting into tears, Hermione laughed, the force of it ripping through her shredded throat in a strangely welcome physical pain, rather than the soul sickness that had torn up her heart, instead.

"I'll take care of him, you go over there," Harry instructed her. When she forced herself to start across the tent floor to the place Lupin was resting, though, Harry came around her and leaned his head down to catch her attention. "You don't have to say anything, at first, okay? Just touch him. You'll both feel better."

Hermione scrunched her face up in agonized guilt. "I know, I know. I just-"

"I've always wanted to try _Imperio!"_ Ron offered, still across the room. Harry facepalmed.

"He's wearing the horcrux, I need to remember that," he almost chanted to himself. "We really need to destroy that thing, if for no other reason than I don't need more reasons to want to punch him sometimes. Step one: healing Hermione?"

"All right, all right," she conceded. With renewed determination, Hermione gave Harry her best strained smile and started back toward Lupin.

When she got there, she was completely shocked. Here was a vision of what Remus Lupin would have looked like if he'd been the one sent to Azkaban for thirteen years. His face was sallow and shrunken, his brown-blonde hair thin and more grey than she remembered it being. His whole body was thin, she saw. Hermione had appreciated seeing Lupin look more taken care of, in the times she'd seen him since his marriage. His standard look of rumpled academic was amplified, before that, by the way his clothes were a bit loose and ill-fitting, with patches in places. Now, his clothes were loose again, but she could tell that was because he'd lost weight. Too much weight.

Hermione sank to her knees beside the bed.

"You don't look so great yourself, you know." His voice was still weak, but the humor in it gave her the strength to reach up from where she was kneeling. She was offering her hand, and if he chose to take it, that was up to him, and she resolved not to take it as any sort of forgiveness.

The pause before he touched her was heavy in the same way their burden to find and destroy horcruxes as three school students was heavy. Then his hand covered hers and _anything was possible._


	9. Compound Fracture

Hermione's nightmares always began the same way: in battle.

She'd be right in the thick of it, wand out, dueling with all her strength, but all around her, people she loved and cared about were dying. Her spells weren't powerful enough to protect them all at once, and no matter what she did, she fell short, again and again.

This one was different, though.

This time she was against the wall, and _this_ time, it was an advantage. She had a vantage point that showed the whole battle; her eyesight was keen, her aim true. She was holding onto what made her strong, her wand weaving fiery patterns in the air, casting spells and defensive measures effortlessly. Sooner than anyone expected, Harry was standing victorious, and Hermione stood, feeling a weight pulling at her left hand.

It was Remus's hand. There had been no wall at Hermione's back-it had been Remus, her strong, powerful partner and soulmate. In the dream, he smiled at her and her heart skipped a beat at the sight. Instead of a simple hug, he lifted her up, her hands at his shoulders as she looked down at him with pride and love.

After a few seconds, his arms started to lower her, and she clasped her hands behind his neck, ready and waiting for the triumphant kiss his body language was telegraphing. Just before their lips met, Hermione exerted control over the dream, gasping.

"No!" she said, waking up. The lanterns weren't lit inside the tent, and instead of kneeling beside the bed, she was lying on top of it, a heavy arm slung across her body to reach her left hand, just like in the dream.

Hermione did _not_ move her hand away despite her very strong desire to repudiate the dream. It was obvious that an insidious soulmate magic seemed to be claiming herself and Remus despite their own hopes and dreams, but she had no desire to relive any of the violent sickness she'd been experiencing for the past few days. Instead, she tried to moderate her breathing back down to non-frantic levels. In the process, Hermione recognized that she wasn't the only one in the room who was trying to calm down.

In that moment, she decided to try to reframe how she thought of him. If their bodies needed to be in proximity, if their behavior was going to have to adjust to accommodate this new necessity, then she would keep at least her mind for herself.

"Bad dream?"

Lupin's voice was mere inches from her head, and she looked over and found that his head was within inches of hers, practically sharing her pillow. "You're… really close," she said.

Lupin lifted his arm off of her as a kind of response, pulling their joined hands down to rest between their bodies on the bed. Hermione turned onto her back so she could look at him without hurting her neck.

"You have quite the strong grip," he told her. "You fell asleep kneeling, and when I tried to pull you up to be more comfortable, you flopped down and rolled over," Lupin said in an amused voice. "It just so happened every other part of you was covered."

Hermione lifted her head to look down at what she was wearing. He was right- she'd felt freezing cold toward the end of the day before, and she'd put on socks, trousers, and a long-sleeved shirt. Not an inch of skin was visible this morning, and when she lifted up her right hand, she saw that she'd pulled down the over-long sleeve and covered her hand with it.

"You've got a hood on, too," Lupin whispered to her, like it was a secret.

"That was completely unintentional, I promise," Hermione said, horrified. "Although, I knew you were coming, and I was wearing the horcrux through some of that time, so it's possible it was subconscious…"

"Horcrux?" Lupin asked.

Hermione lifted both of her hands up to cover her face, forgetting one of them came with a passenger. She wished she could shake off his grip on her, but she knew better.

"I promise I will tell you, but I can't, not right now," she said in a voice that sounded far more annoyed when spoken than it had in her head.

Lupin made a sound of strangled anger. He held up their joined hands and shook them. "You didn't tell me about _this,_ and now there are more secrets? How much am I supposed to be kept from learning about, when a trio of students who haven't even graduated Hogwarts are the ones keeping the details from me!"

"Yelling at me isn't going to earn you any answers," Hermione said coldly, turning her face away from him. She wanted to turn her body away, too, but that would entail more arm draping, and that was _right out._

"Can we sit up? I feel at a very distinct disadvantage. It's hard to think clearly," Lupin said after over a minute of silence. His voice was much softer and less angry.

"All right," she said, not caring to soften her own tone. Using her other hand, she pushed herself up and then looked over at Lupin, who was still lying prone.

Hermione suppressed a sigh. She didn't want to use his name; it felt far too intimate (especially after her determination to distance herself from him in her own mind), but she also felt like calling him 'Professor' was going to start an argument. Instead, she just looked at him and when he finally made eye contact with her, she raised as expressive an eyebrow as she'd ever managed. His reaction was more gratifying than Ron or Harry's had been in the past. They had grown inured to her attempts at facial expression intimidation over the years.

"Sorry, sorry," he said, but still didn't sit up. "It's just… I thought of something that would help, but I feel almost as if I ought to ask your permission beforehand," he said apologetically. "As if I'd be drugging you against your will." His gaze dropped to their joined hands.

Hermione suddenly understood what he was implying. They'd probably been in physical contact for hours, by now. The narcotic effect he was referring to had faded during their sleep, but Lupin seemed to think it might resurface if they broke and regained contact with each other.

"I understand the logic of what you're trying to say, here, but I really hate the suggestion that I might be easier to deal with if I were- were _artificially delighted_ by our _ancient magical slave bond,"_ Hermione said with uncharacteristic venom. "It makes sense to use the separation wisely though. Go relieve yourself? Harry can show you where."

She wanted to just pull her hand free, but she didn't hate _him_, just their predicament, and so she waited.

"I both object to and sympathize with your assessment of our situation," Lupin said.

"Well, that's something, I guess," Hermione said sadly.

"Quick, like a plaster?" Remus asked, looking pointedly at their hands.

"I am not going to assign any sort of symbolism or mysticism to this," Hermione said. "Off you go!" she added, pulling her hand away. She forced herself not to say anything about the lack of thunderclaps or instant projectile vomiting.

She _did_ feel different, but not so much so that she was prepared to declare the evidence of the past weeks as invalid. There was no escaping the fact of their connection.

Hermione took care of her own body's needs, thinking as she did so that she ought to have told Harry or Ron where she went, in case the volatility of the soulmate bond came into play during the walk there and back.

When she walked within sight of the tent again, it had been just under ten minutes since she left, and she was already feeling emotionally uneasy. There were no physical symptoms, but that felt like a 'yet.' Just that much was discouraging, but she wasn't ready to consider an uneasy feeling as enough proof of a disquieted soul bond just yet. As it turned out, though, she was not the only person in the immediate vicinity who was agitated.

"I thought so too! But I CAN'T!" Ron was yelling, when she walked through their silencing perimeter wards.

"You're blaming ME for this?" Harry hollered right back. "Why did you bother coming with us at all if you couldn't handle-"

"_Horcruxes_ I can handle," Ron said in a withering voice. "It's losing Hermione to an old man who is, OH RIGHT, a _werewolf!_ THAT, I can't deal with!"

"You think we _needed_ you for anything to do with skill? We brought you for a third NECK!" Harry screamed, lifting himself up on his toes to punctuate the last word.

"Harry, Ron isn't blaming you, he's blaming _me,"_ Lupin said, stepping toward the two fighting boys just as Hermione walked into the room.

She placed a hand at her own neck unconsciously, thinking as she did so that whichever one of her best friends who had on the locket should give it over as soon as possible. When she locked eyes with Lupin, though, he nodded to her as if asking about her well-being, and stretched out his hand at his side, offering it to her to alleviate whatever symptoms she might be feeling.

Hermione shook her head decisively, just once. The last thing she wanted to use as a tool to defuse this situation was _euphoria._

"Which one of you is wearing the horcrux?" she asked in as firm and commanding a tone as she could, deliberately not yelling.

"Well I can tell you who is _not,"_ Harry sneered. "Weasleys' Wizard Whines over there hasn't worn it in hours. Fat lot of good he does, setting up the tent…" Harry paused as if trying to think of something else Ron did that might count as productive, before shrugging in a cruelly dismissive way. Hermione glowered at him, and then turned toward Ron.

Ron's face was white as a sheet, but his ears and his fists were beet red. He was sucking in air through pursed lips, the force of each breath causing his cheeks to blow out slightly, flaring out his lips and his nostrils. What hurt Hermione, though, was the way he looked at _her._ Her dear, faithful friend Ron looked at her like she was someone to be despised. The shift in his expression from blind fury when looking at Harry to hollow disgust when he turned toward Hermione made her step back away from him in shock.

"Ron?" she whispered, stricken.

"_He doesn't deserve you!"_ Ron whined, pointing at Lupin. "He hasn't cared for you for years, stayed at your side, kept you _safe_ like I always have!"

Harry, with the horcrux glowing at his throat, couldn't let that stand. "And look where it _got_ you, you pathetic little-"

"Harry, I'm coming to take that off your neck and if you fight me I _will_ knock you out with no problem whatsoever, using magic or force," Hermione snapped at Harry. "I'm taking it off of you in two minutes. You hear me?" She didn't wait for a response, focusing instead on Ron. "Ron, you're right. You've always been there for me. You keep me safe, and I'm so grateful for it, and I've never really said that out loud, have I? I'm sorry. Please, stay."

As a show of how much she meant what she was saying, Hermione stepped toward Ron, holding both of her hands out in front of her as if soothing a wild animal.

Ron was still almost hyperventilating, and she started to worry that he would pass out, though in an emergency like this one that might be an advantage.

"No, Harry's right. I'm no good to him and I'm no good for you," Ron said, suddenly deflated. "I haven't even graduated Hogwarts and he's a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor! He can help destroy those things far better than I can!"

Hermione felt like the urge to tread carefully here was related to the unfairness of her bond with Lupin, and while it was the right instinct, that knowledge made her very angry. _If fate would just let me be, I could be so much more useful than one half of some stupid love connection!_ she thought to herself. In her hesitation, though, she had forgotten about Harry and his horcrux-fueled fury.

"Finally some truths spoken out of your miserable mouth!" Harry crowed at Ron. "You're absolutely right! Here, Professor. You're probably the best person to wear this out of all four of us."

Harry reached up and released the clasp of the locket from around his neck with no trouble whatsoever.

"_Perfect,"_ Ron snapped. "Just replace me completely. I'm clearly not needed."

In her peripheral vision, Hermione saw Ron start to trace out the wand movements for Apparition, and despite her need to stop Harry, she looked over at Ron in horror. Just before he disappeared, Ron shook his head at her, the action causing a tear to fall down his cheek.

Hermione felt like he took some of her well-being, some of her _heart_ with him, but she couldn't even chase after him in that moment, because something told her the horcrux really wanted to be worn by a werewolf. With her fist clenched tightly around her wand, Hermione turned back toward Harry and Lupin.

"Take it, sir. You're the most qualified," Harry said, thrusting his fist toward Lupin, the locket protruding from his grasp, the chain wrapped around Harry's fingers.

"Don't do it!" she cried out. "Harry, give it to me or put it back on, _please."_

A shard of pure fear had struck her heart on hearing what Harry had said. She'd thought at first that the necklace had been hanging from Harry's hand. Was the horcrux also imbued into the chain? If not, it had sunk its evil tendrils into his mind so deeply that removing the thing hadn't been enough to shake its influence. That didn't bode well at all for the time between now and when they were able to destroy it.

"I need an explanation _now,"_ Remus demanded. His wand was out, he was standing with his back to the flimsy tent wall, and his eyes looked wild with confusion and concern.

"We don't have _time-"_

Hermione took a deep breath and, as Harry was talking with his back to her, she walked up and reached out, yanking the locket down so that it hung beneath Harry's fist, instead. Even if the chain was every bit as venomous as the rest of it, this would refocus Harry's anger onto her, instead.

Harry threw his whole body backwards. He pulled his fist toward his chest, and Hermione winced. The way he was cradling it meant that what she'd done basically did nothing to wrest his mind away from the horcrux's influence, but she'd at least gotten him angry at her instead of Lupin. There was no way she was letting the cursed thing anywhere near him, not with the full moon in mere days.

With her hands held out placatingly in front of her, Hermione tried to sound soothing as she tried to remember what the date was. When she was done counting the days, she let her hands fall limp at her sides and started laughing humorlessly. The unreality of the past thirty-six hours had finally gotten to be too much.

"They're shards of a bad man's soul. That's what a horcrux is. It's what kept him alive after he killed Harry's parents," Hermione said, holding her stomach. The mirthless laughter that kept bubbling up was agony against the muscles that she'd used while vomiting so much the day before. Somehow, that just made the picture of the previous day all the more miserably perfect.

"Shards- so, a ripped away piece of… _him_ is somehow inside that locket?" Lupin said. The way he was careful to avoid saying its owner's name told Hermione he understood her completely.

She nodded. "It makes us all mean. Understatement of the year, really."

She looked over at where Harry was now crouched on the floor of the tent, both hands cupped around the locket. He looked like he was waging a terrible internal battle; sweat shone on his forehead, and his face was set in a grimace of pain and determination. Every few seconds he shook his head as if there was a conversation going on inside his mind that he needed to repudiate.

"All right, I think I've got a better grasp on this, but, Hermione, why are you laughing?" Lupin asked.

Hermione scrubbed her hands over her face, unsurprised to feel wetness there. Then, she shrugged helplessly. "Yesterday was my birthday. I'm officially an adult."

For a second, Lupin shook his head at her, as if he couldn't see any reason why that could possibly be amusing. As he continued to look at her in confusion, she moved to put herself between him and Harry. When Harry saw what she'd done, he suddenly threw himself toward her as if the horcrux had convinced him he could knock her down on his way to Lupin.

"Don't cast against him, please? Just back away!" Hermione shouted to Lupin, throwing one leg back in a bracing stance.

In the seconds before Harry came into contact with her, she heard Lupin speaking an incantation behind her, and she felt a surge of anger that he'd ignored her. That lasted for as long as it took for Harry to reach her, because as soon as he got within a hair's breadth of her, he bounced off of the invisible magical shield that Lupin must have cast on her. It was a clever move, and she felt guilty for underestimating him.

Harry appeared stunned and senseless, and Hermione reached down for the locket.

"Wait!" Lupin walked up to stand beside her, and she turned her body to keep herself between him and Harry. "Tell me why he's so determined to give that thing to me, and why you're equally determined not to?"

"It corrupts your intentions. It uses your weaknesses and strengths against you, and pits you against everyone. You feel _righteous,_ when this happens," Hermione said bluntly. "On top of that, I think it _wants_ to be worn by you. You're stronger than either of us, and the full moon is in three days."

"_Shit,"_ Remus whispered.

"Yes, well. Generally we try to avoid making it happy," Hermione said wryly. Behind her, Harry groaned. "And that's what makes it my turn to wear it," she added, taking a deep breath to fortify herself.

In one fluid movement, she turned and knelt by Harry, prying his hand open and pulling free the horcrux locket. As soon as the metal stopped touching his skin, Harry started coughing convulsively.

"I've got him," Lupin said. He leaned over and picked up Harry, shifting his weight so that his wand hand had some range of movement. Lupin carried him to the nearby cot and Hermione watched, the locket dangling between her hands as she held it by each end of the clasp.

"Why can't you lock it away in a chest or something?" he asked, after he'd settled Harry down. Without waiting for her answer, Lupin cast a diagnostic charm and then nodded with apparent satisfaction at whatever the result was.

His idea sounded brilliant, but Hermione shook her head. She already felt the insidious influence of the thing seeping into her like rotten molasses. "It will get lost- influence strangers to rescue it, exert itself in a million different devious ways to separate itself from us. It is, horribly, better this way." With leaden fingers, Hermione clasped the horcrux around her neck. "Please don't believe anything mean that I say from this point on?" she asked Lupin.

He smiled at her, the weariness seeming to lift with the genuineness of his expression. It was attractive, and Hermione let that thought sink through her chest and into her gut, recognizing it as the horcrux. A tiny injection of adrenaline coursed through her veins at her next thought: what if the horcrux _wanted_ her to embrace their bond?

"Hermione?" Lupin said. She blinked her eyes and looked up at him. He'd stepped quite close while she'd been woolgathering, and the smile was still on his face.

She told herself she hated it.

She did not.


	10. Data Collection

Chapter Nine: Data Collection

Lupin's smile faded. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"It's nothing. It's- the Horcrux's influence starts right away. Remember: don't take anything personally. Even if I look at you like you're insane, or an idiot," Hermione told him. "I might still look at you like you're insane if you answer my next question truthfully, though, because I think _I_ am insane, too."

"Go ahead and ask," Lupin said. He planted a hand on the bed and lowered himself to where he could lean up against it as he sat on the tent floor.

"Did… did Ron really _leave?_ Leave as in-" _As in he hates us, me in particular, because of something I have no control over. Over something I tried to take control over, and ended up hurting him as a direct result!_ She didn't say these last sentences out loud, but she felt the emotional power of them weighing her down.

"As in he isn't planning to come back for a while?" Lupin finished for her. "Yes, I think so. I'm sorry."

Her body, mind, and magic felt like they were pushing her toward Lupin. Hermione crossed her arms against the strength of the compulsion. From where he was sitting up against the bed, Lupin took off his shoes and socks. Then, he cast a spell to chase away any foot odor. Ron could have stood to learn that spell since he started Hogwarts, the horcrux suggested. Harry too, for that matter.

Lupin stretched out his legs, and his feet came all the way over to where Hermione was standing. When his foot leaned sideways to rest against her foot and ankle, Hermione cleared her throat meaningfully.

"My trousers are tucked into my socks," she said bluntly.

"What? Oh!" Lupin slid his legs away from her. "I honestly didn't even notice that I was trying to touch you."

"It's okay, I'm just delaying the inevitable, apparently," Hermione grumbled. She walked over and sat on the end of the bed within arm's reach of him. "This is just like an odd reversal of a plot device in the _Dune_ books, honestly."

Lupin leaned his head back against the bed so he could look up at her. "Which one?"

_The one where I can't live without a resource, but that resource is rare, precious to someone else, and I have to change my whole way of living in order to consume it at all! And that resource is YOU!_ Hermione thought to herself in frustration. That wasn't what she'd thought of at first, though. She tamped down the vicious voice in her mind that started plucking at the string of guilt that she felt about Lupin and Tonks. Focusing on the book series helped a little.

"There's this moment where the teenage boy protagonist has to force himself to do something that is excruciatingly painful. It's a test, a test of humanity. Humans make choices to do things that are hurtful because they're necessary for some reason or another," Hermione said. "Animals just work on pure instinct- at least, that's the argument at the time."

"Touching me is excruciatingly painful?" Lupin asked in a quiet, hurt voice.

"Yes! No." Hermione made a frustrated sound, sliding down the end of the bed to sit on the floor beside him. "It feels excruciatingly _good._ So good that it's very tempting to tell the rest of the world and your _wife_ that they can all go to hell. That's terrifying for me."

"She sent me here," Lupin said. He was smoothing out a frayed hole at the knee of his trousers, running his fingers around it over and over. "I was having nightmares, and after a month of them she decided to get to the bottom of it. It was Dora that figured out you were hiding it."

Hermione gasped. She stared at the side of Lupin's head, her eyes tracing his features as she struggled to breathe properly. She didn't know if she wanted him to turn toward her and let her see the expression on his face, or if she wanted him to deny her that. Both prospects felt awful in their potential hurtfulness. The undeniable truth of their connection was the thing that would inevitably rip apart Lupin's relationship with his wife, no matter what she did. It would have to.

She retreated in every way she could, scooting a few inches away from him, her knees up, arms around them, head laid on top. Hermione's hair shut the curtain around her, its weight no longer held back by the ribbon she'd tied into it at the nape of her neck.

Each silent second that passed since Lupin had told her that Tonks had sent him to her felt accusatory. She searched her mind and found nothing to say, and as those seconds passed, she tentatively searched her for any words that could help. All she found was the truth.

"I'm speechless," she whispered. "I've- nothing. _Nothing."_ A word came to her, and she spoke it quickly, unthinkingly. "Only respect."

_That's right,_ her horcrux-twisted mind told her. _Respect for the witch who knows what's good for her. A superseded claim is no life to live with a baby in your belly._

Suddenly, the way Hermione was essentially hunched up around the horcrux felt intolerable. She threw her limbs out away from her torso with all of her strength.

_"__Ugh!_ This fucking thing!" she exclaimed in disgust. It wouldn't do any good, she knew, but she still pulled the chain away from her neck enough to lift the locket away from skin contact.

"We don't have to talk about… _that_ aspect, right now," Lupin said perceptively. "You don't need to feel even more guilty about the situation with that thing whispering into your mind."

"That's exactly what it feels like," she said. "The first few times even feel like they could be your own thoughts, as if your true inner self was finally revealed to be a parody of what it's like to feel evil, soulless selfishness."

"That's as good a reason as I've ever heard to test your humanity, Hermione Granger," Lupin said. He stretched his hand out to her low to the floor, palm up, welcoming.

Hermione stared at his hand. Lupin's hands were much bigger than hers, and his nails were neat and even- clearly cut, as opposed to her bitten ones. All she had to do in order to feel wonderful, wanted, (and _wicked)_ would be to place her hand in his. An insane question popped into her mind, and she latched onto it as a way to give herself more time to decide when to reach out. She knew she _would_ reach out.

"What would happen if I could touch you while the moon first rose?" she blurted out. "Would it- _could it_ mitigate the pain you feel?"

"Wow," Lupin said, pulling back and rubbing the scars along his knuckles. "That's… I don't know. It would be far too dangerous to try, I'd have to think."

_'__Tempting.'_ That was the word Hermione felt he'd stopped himself from saying. The Wolfsbane potion helped immensely with everything about the transformation but the awful bone-searing pain, she knew. There wasn't anything she knew of that could safely mitigate it.

"I could… look into it?" she whispered.

"I can't let you put yourself-" Lupin started to say angrily.

"-in books. Look in books, I mean," she rushed to interrupt him. "And you're in no position to tell me what I can and can't do," Hermione added, lifting her chin defiantly. He totally _was_ at least somewhat in that position, but neither of them addressed that.

As a kind of punctuation to this statement, she thrust her hand out toward him.

"You're sure?" Lupin asked, his anger melting into uncertainty.

"Would I have reached out, otherwise?"

"Oh, Hermione," Lupin said in a gentle voice. "Yes. Yes, you would."

Guilt twisted in her gut at the way her name sounded, coming from his lips. Hermione felt like her mind was at war. The horcrux was almost singing to her about the pleasures to be had in delighting in her soul bond. Her mind was fighting the idea of being destined to destroy a marriage.

Her heart ached to lose Ron, to hurt Harry, and to be the cause of heartache for Lupin. She dropped her hand, and then curled it back around her legs again.

"Look," Lupin said, scooting over to her on his knees. He sat back on his feet and tipped his head sideways to look at her. "You need to stop thinking of this bond as something you're actively participating in. We're not at that step. We don't need to think about that," he said firmly. "Right here, right now, you're taking care of yourself, and I'm taking care of myself. That's what this is about."

He held both hands out expectantly.

The contrast in their body language was striking. His was open and welcoming, hers was closed off and bunched up.

"Is this hesitation because of the horcrux or your own innate sense of justice, at this point?" he asked her with a hint of humor in his voice.

Hermione buried her head in her knees again and groaned in frustration. "Both," she said. "The horcrux is all for it, and let me just tell you how much of a ringing endorsement _that_ is."

"It's pretty impossible to manipulate a half-dead witch who is uncontrollably vomiting, isn't it?" Lupin said quietly.

Hermione lifted her head. "That helps, actually," she told him.

"Then I'll add another: I don't feel very well. Put me out of my misery?"

This made her smile deviously. "That's a dangerous offer, Mr. Lupin," she said archly. "Though it's possible I am incapable of actually hurting you. I wonder if I-" Hermione looked around for her notebook.

"Focus, Hermione. Touch now. Research later," Lupin said in a commanding tone. It made Hermione shiver a little in a way she wasn't altogether sure she didn't like.

"Right, right," she said. She changed her position to mimic his, moving closer on her knees and taking a deep breath. Just before she reached out again, she thought of something. "Wait, should we-"

Lupin started to laugh and lifted his hand, cupping her face with it. "Shhhh," he said.

Before she could stop herself, Hermione turned and pressed her lips against the palm of his hand. He sucked in a breath, stunned, and she froze in place, her mouth still on him as she processed how it felt.

Somehow denying herself his touch for so long had turned it into a craving that was finally fulfilled; that was the only explanation she could think of for why simple contact like this could delight her senses like this. The feeling of being completed, of being truly _known_ was back, and she rejected it as if the act of rejecting it was habitual.

This time there was an addition to the sense of well-being and rightness, and it was insidious and wonderful- desire.

"Great Merlin," Lupin said in a gravelly voice that went straight to her groin. "That is a complication."

"Mmmm," was all she could say in agreement, and his fingers spasmed against her face in an unconscious caress in reaction to the vibration of speech.

Hermione looked over at him and saw that his eyes were closed as blissful, but as she watched, he grimaced and opened them. Reluctantly, she reached up and slid her fingers in between his, sliding their joined hands down against her chest. Everything she wanted to say to him and was too afraid to suddenly bubbled up, and she couldn't stop herself.

"I'm so sorry. At the time I figured it out, I could tell that Tonks was miserable. She was stationed at Hogwarts, and I offered to give her the research page I'd come up with, and she was just so happy. I could tell it was because she wanted to have a reason to see you, and I just… I couldn't take that away! I could see how much trouble this would cause in the Order, how you'd struggled for the respect you'd earned, the position of authority you have, and I thought, 'how difficult could it be?'"

Lupin's fingers twitched against hers and she looked over at him to find that he was shaking his head, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes and the twist of his lips.

"It wasn't _that_ difficult," she protested in response to his reaction. "I came up with a potion and tested it. My big mistake that day was not having enough of the supply left after we'd escaped the wedding! I was in the middle of making some when you showed up."

After she spoke, Hermione waited to hear the reflection of what the Horcrux's influence would be on what she'd said. There was nothing.

"That's a lot of effort," Lupin said after a long silence. "What I can't understand is how you were able to show so little response to the initial touch. It was, it _is…"_ he trailed off and scooted closer to her, changing from kneeling to sitting, careful not to pull his hand away from their requisite contact. Lupin ended up beside her, his warmth welcoming against her body through their clothes.

Too late, she realized that he was very close, close enough that she braced herself for the thoughts that would come flooding through her mind as they always did so close to Harry or Ron when wearing the Horcrux. Hermione bit her lip and dipped her head down. The _lack_ of the Horcrux's influence was more disturbing than any of the crude things she had expected it to suggest to her. She still felt the desire that had crushed her with its intensity when she'd kissed his palm, and Hermione wondered if _that_ was the Horcrux, instead of the bond.

"Tell me what you're thinking? You look very concerned," Lupin said softly.

All she would have to do to kiss him would be to turn her head and angle up, but did that knowledge come from the Horcrux or from the soul bond?

"Hermione?" Lupin murmured, his thumb brushing across the back of her hand. She drew in a quick breath at how much she liked what she heard and what she felt.

"Don't say my name like that, please," Hermione forced herself to tell him. "Just- just use my last name, for now. It's too-"

"I will, but you can't avoid me like this. We're going to figure this out _together,_ or not at all," Lupin said in an unhappy voice.

"I'm sorry, I just-" she turned her head, leaning back a bit so their faces wouldn't be quite so near each other. His pupils were dark, a strong signal that he was as affected as she was. "I'm not feeling the influence of the Horcrux in a way I'm used to. So either the soul bond is overwhelming it, or as I said before, it likes the implications of what's going on and doesn't need to push me to encourage them. Which, let's face it, is pretty awful and terrifying!"

"I recognize that you need to be constantly aware of how it's influencing you, but Hermi-" he made a face of frustration for having forgotten her request. "But let me tell you, from my end, you're dwelling on it in a way that's also harmful. Which may actually be the point, for that thing around your neck."

"I just hate how I can't tell the difference between what's prompted by the soul bond and what's from the Horcrux!" she said, nearly crying in frustration. The look of sympathy on his face despite everything she'd done to essentially ruin his life made her lean over, pull her hand free from him and hug him with both arms, her face pressed into his chest. The reward from her compromised emotions was a wave of peace and affection that, treacherously, didn't feel false at all.

"What you need is more data," Remus said into her hair.

Hermione tried to sit back up and pull away from him, but his arms wrapped around her upper body and held her still.

"More data and more acclimatization, I think," he added, sliding his fingers into her hair until they rested against her neck, skin to skin.

Had that been a pleasure point for her before? She didn't know, but she wasn't strong enough in her convictions to shrug his hand away. Hermione felt like a terrible person but she just closed her eyes and let the thrill of his touch wash over her, breathing in his unfamiliar scent.

She'd heard what he said but it took a minute or two for her to fully understand them. "Acclimatization?" she asked.

"We have to get used to this. I haven't read anything about soulmates being required to touch each other constantly, but neither have I read about anyone ever fighting the bond," Lupin said.

"I just had to be different!" Hermione said. She felt his laugh against her body and it made her really happy to have caused it. That made her frown.

"Ugh, am I happy because I made you laugh and the bond is rewarding me with joy because I'm obedient? Or is the Horcrux planning to use our soulbond to destroy the Order of the Phoenix and thus any sign that I welcome your influence is a good thing that it wants to artificially boost?" Hermione groaned, trying again to pull herself away from Lupin.

"That's part of the data collection phase," he said, sliding his hands along her sides as he pulled his arms away from her.

Hermione sighed in pleasant reaction to the way his hands on her body felt, and then, now that she could sit back up and pull away from him, covered her face in her hands and shook her head, her hair falling over them and tickling her skin. She'd once again pulled her knees up toward her chest, but to her surprise, Lupin pressed down on her left knee until her leg was flat.

With gentle but precise movements, Lupin then pulled her sock off, bent his own knees, and positioned her foot so that it was resting between his own bare feet. This meant they were touching, but not in a way that had an established, socially constructed meaning behind it. Not _established,_ anyway.

"Are you trying to give me a foot fetish?" Hermione asked before she could stop herself.

"You are an unexpected delight," Lupin exclaimed, shaking his head at her. He kept looking at her even when she knew her face had flushed bright red once again. Then, he nudged her elbow.

"I'm not wearing the Horcrux, so there's a bit of an answer," he said. "Go on, I know you're itching for your notebook. That's why I did the foot thing. I assume that once we've spent a few days _near_ each other, the necessity of always touching, skin to skin, will diminish."

"That's something we'll have to document," Hermione said, pulling free her wand to _Accio_ her notebook even though ordinarily it would have been second nature to her to stand up, walk over, and retrieve it. "After all, that would make sense if there's no emotional acceptance component. But if there is, well…"

"Well, then we'll have a whole new host of issues," Lupin agreed.

Finally, Hermione felt a twinge that she recognized as coming from the Horcrux. It prompted her to feel just a slight bit rejected.

It was definitely the Horcrux, Hermione told herself. She had no reason to want Remus to embrace the bond, after all.

88888888888888888888888888

After a bit of a rough start ("What about the full moon? How are you going to keep in contact with your wife if there are only three of us and you can't wear the Horcrux?!" "We have to take these things one at a time."), the two of them came up with a scale of grading their reactions to each other, with an eye toward comparing Hermione's reactions to Lupin's, both with and without the Horcrux. He was the 'control' group, as he couldn't wear the Horcrux for obvious reasons.

It was a number scale, which neatly avoided the emotional impact of words like 'pleasure' and 'overwhelming,' and it ranked the intensity of their emotional well-being and their physical sense of well-being from one to ten. Hermione hadn't been brave enough to suggest they put a third scale in for rating desire, but she planned to note down that as well, in French, in the margins. They were using a new page for each assessment, after all, and they wouldn't be looking at them until they chose a concluding date, so if she simply kept her pages out of his sight and compiled them before they compared the notes, he would be none the wiser, she was sure. She'd magically erase the French notations before he even knew they were there.

She justified the choice to keep track of her feelings of desire for him and hiding those notes by telling herself that it was a key component to the Horcrux manipulation. There was no way she could be open with Lupin about that aspect, not with his marriage on the line. He was already so upset at her for keeping him out of the loop on so much of it, but Hermione just knew that everything might still be salvaged if only she could give the impression that their bond was satisfied by mutual respect and affection.

It _had_ to be plausible that she and Lupin could form a strong friendship, enhanced by the soul bond, and reap the benefits of both the bond _and_ his marriage, she reasoned. What more could physical desire add that intelligence, knowledge, and respect couldn't?

Hermione snuck a look at him over her notebook. They were on the couch, their feet touching at an awkward angle because of his leg length relative to hers. It was part of the experiment they'd come up with that they had stretches of time touching without speaking, stretches of time touching while speaking, and a few stretches of time without either. She could tell that he was working on a design for a structure to contain him for the full moon, because his notebook was full of sketches as the plan evolved. He re-drew each modification, leaving notes that she wasn't close enough to read clearly.

The timer would go off soon and they could talk about what they'd come up with. She tried not to look forward to it. Hermione hadn't realized she'd been staring at him until he looked up from his notebook and made eye contact with her.

It felt like a physical touch, and Hermione looked back down at her paper, trying to school her breathing so she didn't look as affected as she felt.

She made a note in the margins of her page in French.


End file.
